SOURCE: “Learning New Titles,” in Times Literary Supplement, No. 5,059, March 17, 2000, p. 26.

In the following essay, Sage praises Critical Conditions and Gubar's ability to remain committed to explicating the varieties of feminist criticism which have developed since the publication of The Madwoman in the Attic.

Recent statistics in the United States have apparently revealed that fewer women are being murdered by their husbands, not because there's less misogyny abroad but because there's less marriage. This is a good example of the way in which there have been enormous changes in the patterns of people's lives, which seem only loosely or mockingly related to what we projected. No wonder the postmodern picture of the individual as a passive construction of occult power at large seems plausible. Susan Gubar, looking at the relation between what 1970s feminist teachers and scholars wanted, and what has actually happened, is caught in a similar...