SOURCE: “A Critic's Work Is Never Done,” in Women's Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 9, June, 2000, p. 17.

In the following review of Critical Conditions, Reddy pays tribute to Gubar's pioneering feminist criticism.

Retrospectively, we can all trace epochs in our lives, moments when everything changed. It is more difficult to recognize those moments in the present tense; but I remember knowing I was living through such an epoch-change in my own life in 1979 as I read Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's co-authored The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. I was a beginning graduate student in English, planning to focus on Victorian fiction; I had read most of the feminist literary criticism then in print (amazing now that it once was possible to do such a thing!) and knew that I wanted to contribute to that field, but was uncertain about what exactly...