Rereading Women: Thirty Years of Exploring Our Literary Traditions

The Madwoman in the Attic, a reading of 19th-century women writers, which Gilbert co-wrote with Susan Gubar in 1979, was a landmark of second-wave feminism. It serves as a jumping-off point for this collection of essays spanning three decades and reflecting Gilbert's continuing insights. Most of the initial entries in this volume flow from Gilbert's personal experiences in the forefront of the feminist movement. In "A Fine, White Flying Myth" she discusses the work of Sylvia Plath in light of her own tenure as a guest editor of Mademoiselle four years after Plath had been in that same position in the 1950s. Gilbert speaks of Emily Dickinson's self-mythologizing in order to transform 19th-century notions of womanhood and Jane Eyre as an "an unprecedentedly passionate heroine" who decides to cast off her Christian piety and accept a "hedonistic theology of love." Gilbert's close reading of the writers she calls "our literary mothers"—George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton, Plath, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and others—is persuasive though somewhat pedantic. While it may not appeal to the general reader, this collection contains enough authoritatively reasoned and provocative arguments to make it a candidate for the very women's studies courses Gilbert herself pioneered. (May)