Susan Gubar

Yes, it's dated, but for my generation this was so exciting. This made going to grad school feel like punk rock (for grad students, so, y'know, not that punk). We were going to change the academy & then the world & Gilbert & Gubar were showing us how.
Try to read this book as if it's the first or at most second piece of feminist criticism you've ever read. Imagine Austen & the Brontes and Dickinson constantly trivialized and George Eliot lauded for her masculine writing in everything you've seen before. Try to think about Bertha Rochester's life as completely unproblematic. Then read this book and you'll get a sense of what we felt.… (mere)

A compelling and beautiful written memoir, extensively researched and refreshingly honest. This grueling personal account by one of the top feminists in academia details the horrors an ovarian cancer patient usually undergoes and reveals how little progress has been made in the treatment and detection of ovarian cancer over the past few years. Gubar takes the reader to the depths of her despair and then back up to the heights of her joy and gratitude at the life she's been given, and especially her beloved husband Don. This is, above all else, a love story that is real, poignant and a must read. Highly recommend.… (mere)

As a former newspaper editor who worships the written word, I really wanted to enjoy this book. I believe that the purpose of this work is to show people how words, both written and read, can help people suffering from cancer and their caregivers hope and relief. However, while there are some wonderful ideas and advice, it is written in a manner that simply put me to sleep. If it had not been a short book, I would have put it down, which I did several times temporarily, but due to its short length, I forced myself to finish. The bottom line is that the time I wasted reading this book is time I will never have again which sounds excessively harsh, but is one I can’t shake.… (mere)

Another university textbook I've been meaning to read cover-to-cover for a long time. Famous enough that everyone ignores the clever title and just calls it "Gilbert & Gubar", over 600 pages long, and with in-depth studies of half a dozen of the biggest names in nineteenth-century literature, it's a daunting prospect. Happily it turns out to be eminently readable, much more so than I remember from when I was writing essays - maybe my standards have changed?

The really important thing about it, of course, is that it's one of the books that made respectable the idea that we need to look at the work of women writers in terms of their role as women in the society of the time, and also bearing in mind that they were writing for a largely female audience. (G&G appeared in 1979, about the same time as Elaine Showalter's A literature of their own.) Where more recent feminist critique tends to mix in other theoretical approaches, G&G look almost exclusively at how women writers deal with and aare influenced by the situation of women in the society of their times, and their own role as women writers in particular. How do you deal with the assertive act of speaking out in print in a society where the ideal of feminine behaviour is supposed to be passive and silent? Despite the famous, aggressively Freudian, opening line, there is little or no recourse to the usual male authority-figures of lit-crit (Marx, Freud, Derrida, Barthes, Foucault...). Virginia Woolf, of course, is quoted heavily, and G&G have quite a bit to say about how 19th century women writers saw each others' work.

One part I found especially interesting was the discussion of how women writers engaged with Milton: maybe an obvious question to pose for Frankenstein and Middlemarch, but not at all self-evident for Wuthering Heights until you've seen their analysis.

With hindsight, one of the surprising things about the book is the way it sticks to the narrowly-defined "canon" of 19th century English writing - there is only the very briefest discussion of Victorian popular novelists who have since fallen out of favour (Mrs Oliphant, Charlotte M. Yonge, Harriet Beecher Stowe, etc.), and apart from Emily Dickinson there is nothing about women writers who were relatively unknown in their own time. Obviously the reason for this is that they want to concentrate their energy on the writers who have received the lioness's share of critical attention and show how looking at them as women can change our perception of their work and what it is trying to say. Rediscovering writers who were unfairly neglected isn't part of their remit. But it does mean that you shouldn't try to use this book on its own to get a view of women's writing in 19th century England (and New England...). Let alone anywhere else.… (mere)