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The western canon was not liberated overnight, but Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar certainly stuck a wedge firmly into the frat house door when they wrote The Madwoman in the Attic. The two were, then, young professors at Indiana University and had co-taught a course in women’s literature when they stumbled onto, what they called in their introduction, a “distinctively female literary tradition … which no one had yet defined in its entirety.” If the grandness of that claim sounds akin to something Harold Carter might have said when he discovered King Tut’s tomb, well, the buried literary treasure Gilbert and Gubar unearthed was, to many of us readers back then, every bit as dazzling.
