Gilbert, Sandra M. 1936- (S.M. Gilbert, Sandra Mortola Gilbert, Rosette Lewis, Sandra Ellen Mortola)

PERSONAL:

Born December 27, 1936, in New York, NY; daughter of Alexis Joseph (a civil engineer) and Angela Mortola; married Elliot Lewis Gilbert (an author, editor, and professor of English), December 1, 1957 (died, 1991); children: Roger, Katherine, Susanna. Education: Cornell University, B.A., 1957; New York University, M.A., 1961; Columbia University, Ph.D., 1968.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, 272 Voorhies Hall, University of California, Davis, CA 95616. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, literary critic, poet, theorist, essayist, and educator. Queens College of the City University of New York, Flushing, NY, lecturer in English, 1963-64, 1965-66; Sacramento State College (now California State University), Sacramento, CA, lecturer in English, 1967-68; California State College (now California State University), Hayward, CA, assistant professor of English, 1968-71; St. Mary's College, Moraga, CA, lecturer in English, 1972; Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, associate professor of English, 1973-75; University of California, Davis, associate professor, 1975-80, professor of English, beginning 1989, became Distinguished Professor of English Emerita; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, professor of English, 1985-89, Charles Barnwell Strout Class of 1923 Professor, 1989.

Literary Classics in the United States, member of board of advisors, 1979-82. Visiting professor at numerous colleges and universities, including Indiana University, Bloomington, fall, 1980; Barnard College (as Gilder-sleeve Professor), fall, 1982; Williams College, fall, 1984; Stanford University, winter, 1985; Johns Hopkins University, fall, 1986; and Cornell University (as M.H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor of English), 2007. Mt. Holyoke Project on Gender Context, director, 1983 and 1984; Humanities Institute, member of executive committee, 1983-87; Northwestern University, School of Criticism and Theory, faculty member, summer, 1984. Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, Paley Lecturer, 1990; University of Washington, Seattle, Danz Lecturer, 1992. Writer-in-residence at Yaddo, MacDowell, Bellagio, and Bogliasco writers' colonies.

MEMBER:

Modern Language Association of America (executive council, 1981-84; nominating committee, 1985-87; second vice president, first vice president, president, 1994-96), D.H. Lawrence Society.

AWARDS, HONORS:

National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, 1980-81; Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize, Poetry Magazine, 1980; Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, 1982; Guggenheim fellowship, 1983; "People Who Made a Difference" designation (with Susan Gubar), USA Today, 1985; Woman of the Year Award (with Susan Gubar), Ms. magazine, 1986; University of California—Davis Humanities Institute fellowship, 1987-88; Charity Randall Award (with Karl Shapiro), International Poetry Foundation, 1990; University of California President's fellowship, 1991-92; Morrison Poetry Prize; fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1997; Soros Foundation fellowship; Patterson Prize for Ghost Volcano: Poems; American Book Award for Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems, 1969-1999; John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry, Italian-American Foundation; Premio Lerici Pea award, Liguri nel Mondo Association; fellow, American Philosophical Society, 2005. Recipient of honorary degrees from Wesleyan University, 1988, and Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2004.

WRITINGS:

Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," Thor Publishing (Ventura, CA), 1964.

Two Novels by E.M. Forster, Thor Publishing (Ventura, CA), 1965.

D.H. Lawrence's "Sons and Lovers," Thor Publishing (Ventura, CA), 1965.

The Poetry of W.B. Yeats, Thor Publishing (Ventura, CA), 1965.

Two Novels by Virginia Woolf, Thor Publishing (Ventura, CA), 1966.

Acts of Attention: The Poems of D.H. Lawrence, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1972, reprinted, University of Southern Illinois Press (Carbondale, IL), 1990.

In the Fourth World: Poems, University of Alabama Press (Tuscaloosa), 1978.

(With Susan Gubar) The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1979, new edition with expanded introduction, 2000.

(Editor, with Susan Gubar) Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1979.

The Summer Kitchen: Poems, Heyeck (Woodside, CA), 1983.

Emily's Bread: Poems, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1984.

(Editor, with Susan Gubar) The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1985, 2nd edition, 1996, 3rd edition, 2007.

(Editor, with Susan Gubar) The Female Imagination and the Modernist Aesthetic, Gordon and Breach Science Publishers (New York, NY), 1986.

Blood Pressure: Poems, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1988.

(With Susan Gubar) No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), Volume 1: The War of the Words, 1988, Volume 2: Sexchanges, 1989, Volume 3: Letters from the Front, 1994.

Ghost Volcano: Poems, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1995.

(With Susan Gubar) Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic Melodrama, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 1995.

(Editor, with Susan Gubar and Diana O'Hehir) Mothersongs: Poems for, by, and about Mothers, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1995.

Wrongful Death: A Medical Tragedy (memoir), W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1995.

(Editor, with Wendy Barker) The House Is Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale), 1996.

(Author of introduction) Constance Bowman Reid and Clara Marie Allen, Slacks and Calluses: Our Sum-mer in a Bomber Factory, Smithsonian (Washington, DC), 1999.

Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems, 1969-1999, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2000.

(Editor and author of introduction) Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2001.

The Italian Collection: Poems of Heritage, Depot Books (San Francisco, CA), 2003.

(Editor and author of introduction) Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Stories, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 2003.

Belongings (poems), W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2005.

Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2006.

(Editor, with Susan Gubar, and author of introduction) Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to anthologies, including Best Little Magazine Fiction, 1971, Bicentennial Poetry Anthology, 1976, Contemporary Women Poets, 1978, The Poetry Anthology, 1978, and Norton Introduction to Literature, 1986-2001.

Contributor to periodicals and journals, including Mademoiselle, Poetry, Epoch, Nation, Field, Critical Inquiry, Massachusetts Review, Kenyon Review, Partisan Review, Ontario Review, American Poetry Review, American Scholar, and the New Yorker.

SIDELIGHTS:

Sandra M. Gilbert has earned acclaim as a literary critic, essayist, and poet. Her study The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, which she wrote with Susan Gubar, was credited with breaking important new ground in the field of women's studies, and has become a classic. The book, according to Le Anne Schreiber in the New York Times Book Review, offers a "bold new interpretation of the great 19th-century woman novelists, [presenting] the first pervasive case for the existence of a distinctly female imagination." As Carolyn See noted in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the authors examine how attitudes toward women and woman writers shaped the literature of Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, and Mary Shelley. See explained that Gilbert and Gubar reveal how these women novelists used the "essentially destructive myth" that a woman writer was an aberration, "the Devil Herself." Nineteenth-century women writers, note Gilbert and Gubar, found themselves "trapped in the specifically literary constructs of what Gertrude Stein was to call ‘patriarchal poetry.’" In response, these writers created what critic Kate Arneson, writing in English Notes, described as "subversive, displaced expressions of their own frustration," such as the madwoman of the title—a reference to Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre. As Arneson pointed out, "the powerful madwoman in the attic is an alter-ego of the gentle and submissive Jane Eyre … a personification of Jane's hidden anger and unconscious resentment of her powerless … state."

The Madwoman in the Attic attracted significant notice from critics, many of whom appreciated its critique of the male-dominated literary canon, and its efforts to create a female literary canon. Some, however, found fault with the book. Rosemary Ashton, in Times Literary Supplement, described it as a "purposefully written book essentially without a thesis," whose "authors exhaust the reader with … formidable but unconvincing rhetoric." She added: "It is hard not to suspect that they found just what they were looking for, and equally hard to give acceptance to their ‘findings.’" Yet, in a Washington Post Book World review, Carolyn G. Heilbrun wrote: "At last, feminist criticism, no longer capable of being called a fad, is clearly and coherently mapped out." Heilbrun concluded that "The Madwoman in the Attic, by revealing the past, will profoundly alter the present, making it possible, at last, for women writers to create their own texts." The book has remained on college reading lists since it first appeared and has become, in Arneson's estimation, "perhaps the most famous text of feminist critics."

Gilbert and Gubar also produced a three-volume series of feminist criticism titled No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. In a Globe and Mail review of the first volume, The War of the Words, which appeared in 1988, Janice Kulyk Keefer called the study a "thoroughly provocative (and provocatively thorough) revisioning of the genesis of modernism." Noting that No Man's Land was written as a sequel to The Madwoman in the Attic, New York Times Book Review contributor Walter Kendrick remarked that if this subsequent work "achieves its complementary goal, it will set the direction of feminist criticism for the next generation of students and scholars."

The third and final volume of the No Man's Land series, Letters from the Front, appeared in 1994. While the first volume provides an overview of writers from Lord Alfred Tennyson forward, and the second—Sexchanges—ends in the years between the two World Wars, the third offers analysis of female writers from the 1920s to the 1980s, including Marianne Moore, Virginia Woolf, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sylvia Plath. Here, Gilbert and Gubar argue that twentieth-century women writers became the subject of "feminizing publicity" and consequent fetishization that antagonized their male contemporaries and led women to assume a self-conscious false femininity. The authors examine the reaction of women writers to World War II, contemporary feminism, and the transformation of the "mother-poet" figure, particularly through their own revisions of the Snow White story.

Elaine Showalter observed in the London Review of Books: "Now, they argue, all the sex roles are so scrambled, the family romance so open-ended, and the epistemological certainties so undermined that it is no longer possible to propose a ‘monolithic’ tale about the female imagination." In Sexchanges, according to Belles Lettres contributor Roberta Rubenstein, "the authors consider the disjunctions between self and self-representation in writers who feel compelled to become, in the interests of their art, what Gilbert and Gubar term ‘female-female impersonators.’" Though finding weaknesses in their coverage of homosexuality, race, and class, Helen Carr concluded in New Statesman and Society: "This packed history helps to clear the rich and varied contribution made by women writers to the modernist movement, something hardly acknowledged when the first volume appeared seven years ago."

Gilbert and Gubar collaborate again as editors on The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English, a physically dense and socially wide-ranging anthology of fiction, essays, poems, and other works by female authors. "Intended as a textbook for courses in women's literature, it is likely to be widely used, because of the prestige of its editors, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in the field of women's studies, and because of the prestige of the Norton anthology series in university literature departments," observed Phyllis Rose in Atlantic Monthly. Accompanied by indepth critical introductions and analysis, the works included in the volume represent a wide range of female authors from a lengthy historical period, from the twelfth to the twenty-first centuries. The introductions are "awesome" when the editors "address themselves more narrowly to women's literature and women in literature," providing, for example, a "brilliant interpretation of Frankenstein in which the experiences of both Frankenstein and his monster are seen as images of female experience," Rose observed. "Read as a polemic, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women constitutes the best extended piece of writing there is on literature by and about women. Gilbert and Gubar have amassed more information about women writers than exists in any other document," Rose stated.

Gilbert experienced an unexpected personal tragedy in 1991 when her husband, Elliot, died after routine surgery for prostate cancer performed at the hospital of the university where he taught English. Gilbert suspected negligence and eventually settled a wrongful death lawsuit out of court. Four years later she published a prose memoir, Wrongful Death: A Medical Tragedy, in which she offers both a bitter indictment of medical malpractice and a tender eulogy for her husband of more than thirty years. In her effort to reconstruct circumstances surrounding her husband's death, Gilbert describes evasive physicians, crass lawyers, and her own deep sorrow. Lisa Alther wrote in the Women's Review of Books: "In Wrongful Death [Gilbert] draws on both her creative and her critical skills. The poet in her conveys the depth of her love for her husband and the agony of his loss, often in very touching images." The book's "power," according to a Publishers Weekly review, "lies in [Gilbert's] anger and her grief, and in her all-consuming determination."

Gilbert produced Ghost Volcano: Poems, a book of poetry in memory of her late husband, in the same year. In this volume she explores her despair and the grieving process while struggling to come to terms with her husband's permanent absence. Diane Wakoski, in the Women's Review of Books, praised Gilbert's rare "Orphic voice," adding that "Ghost Volcano is one of the most satisfying kinds of book a reader can discover. It is an unfolding, the telling of a secret story. Gilbert has organized it so that we follow the progress of her feelings as she embarks on the quest to bring her husband back from the dead by the sheer power of her lyric voice." A Publishers Weekly reviewer described the work as "vulnerable, bitter, and courageous," concluding that "Gilbert confronts grief directly—and endures." As Miriam Levine wrote in American Book Review, "There is a circle that encompasses both the fall and the quest…. The widow in Ghost Volcano circles and comes back to herself, her solitary grief."

Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems, 1969-1999 is a collection that, according to Women's Review of Books contributor Rita Signorelli-Pappas, reveals Gil- bert as "a poet of intense, informed feeling and unusual technical virtuosity," with a "formidable" range of subject. "Poems that might wobble and fall to earth in the hands of another poet," commented the reviewer, "are kept aloft by the sheer effervescent force of [Gilbert's] personality and thought."

In Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies, Gilbert collects a broad selection of poems, essays, and other works memorializing, lamenting, and grieving in the face of death. The book includes material by classic authors, including Milton, Donne, Shakespeare, and Shelley, as well as modern writers such as Jane Kenyon, Donald Hall, Emily Dickinson, Tess Gallagher, and Ruth Stone. All of them explore the depth of emotion that can accompany death, how one can best remember a departed loved one, and how death, despite its shattering effects, is always part of an ancient, unbreakable cycle. Elegies "articulate universal experience and, so doing, speak to a large readership, which this collection certainly deserves," concluded Booklist reviewer Patricia Monaghan.

Belongings, Gilbert's 1995 collection of poems, contains works that possess a sense of melancholy, poems that consider issues such as loss, possessions, and how the things we own define us as persons, both to ourselves and others. For Gilbert, that definition can continue to exist and influence family, friends, and others, even after we have departed and have no more claim to, or need for, the items that enriched us in life. Gilbert's poetic works "soar" under the combination of her "unique view of the natural world with language play and a deep emotional resonance," commented Doris Lynch in Library Journal. Though sorrowful, many of the poems also evoke a sense of hope, Lynch observed.

Gilbert returns to the topics of death, grief, and mourning with Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve. Framed by the keen sadness she still feels over the loss of her husband, and informed anew by the shock and tragedy of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, Gilbert turns to poetry to explore "how we as individuals cope with death on personal, societal, and even universal levels," commented Booklist reviewer Carol Haggas. She seeks answers in poems from a variety of writers, including Rossetti, Whitman, Dickinson, Tennyson, Lawrence, and numerous others. According to a Kirkus Reviews critic, Gilbert "combines autobiographical narrative and literary criticism with anthropological, cultural, and sociological studies to give a broader, more complex picture" of how death is conceptualized, how the dead are honored, and how memorials have changed and evolved throughout the years. Haggas called the book an "exceptionally caring examination" of how individuals and society engage with concepts of mortality and mourning. Gilbert's "close readings of our cultural history will entrance anyone interested in an intelligent analysis of the ways we grieve," commented a Publishers Weekly contributor. Gilbert's book, concluded Library Journal reviewer E. James Lieberman, "will help not only the bereft and those around them but also a society that loves and hates death blindly."

Gilbert, who is the author of several other poetry collections, once told CA: "I see myself as a poet, a critic, and a feminist, hoping that each ‘self’ enriches the others. As a poet, however, I'm superstitious about becoming too self-conscious; as a critic, I want to stay close to the sources of poetry; and as a feminist, I try to keep my priorities clear without sermonizing. Those caveats mean that a statement like this one necessarily has to be short—at least for now."

She later added: "I've been writing poetry since I was four years old, when I discovered that shouting out ‘Mommy, mommy, I have a poem’ would slow down the time-to-go-to-sleep process. My earliest effort, of which I'm still fond, went ‘Zip zip through the air,/Comes a fearful bear!/His name is light'ning/And when he comes you can see the whole sky brightening!’ My influences are wide-ranging and various—hard to describe. There are times when it's best to read Plath, Yeats, Lawrence and Stevens; times to read Homer and Horace; times to read Rilke and Neruda and Breton; times to meditate in linguistic silence. Of course I write differently when I write prose and when I write verse; prose mostly emerges on a glimmering computer screen, verse in a notebook, on a paper napkin, on the other side of a shopping list, on an opera program, anywhere and everywhere, and it's pencilled, inked, crayoned, whatever!

"Perhaps the most surprising thing I've learned as a writer is that the writing itself is always a surprise; no matter how carefully planned, every piece of writing—maybe even a recipe!—turns out to be an adventure in discovery. As for which of my books is my favorite and why, I guess like most people I'm always fondest of what I'm writing at the moment and, speaking of surprises, am always surprised to find that I actually like some of my earlier works!

"And to go on with the theme of surprise, I guess I'd like my readers to be surprised by my writing, so much so that they will also be instructed and delighted."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 120: American Poets since World War II, Third Series, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1992.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1979.

PERIODICALS

American Book Review, December, 1995, M. Levine, review of Ghost Volcano: Poems.

American Literature, March, 1990, Linda Wagner-Martin, review of Sexchanges, p. 107; March, 1998, Jane Lilienfeld, review of Letters from the Front, p. 218.

American Studies International, October, 2001, Lauren Borchard, review of Slacks and Calluses: Our Summer in a Bomber Factory, p. 94.

Atlantic Monthly, August, 1985, Phyllis Rose, review of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English, p. 88; November, 2002, Benjamin Schwarz, "Major Minor," p. 125.

Belles Lettres, spring, 1995, Roberta Rubenstein, review of Sexchanges, p. 30.

Booklist, May 1, 1995, Donna Seaman, review of Mothersongs: Poems for, by, and about Mothers, p. 1547; March 15, 2001, Patricia Monaghan, review of Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies, p. 1346; December 15, 2005, Carol Haggas, review of Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve, p. 6.

California Bookwatch, May, 2006, review of Death's Door.

Choice, September, 1995, D.R. Shanklin, review of Wrongful Death: A Medical Tragedy, p. 166.

Chronicle of Higher Education, December 17, 1999, Scott Heller, "The Book That Created a Canon," p. A20.

Comparative Literature, spring, 1991, Margot Norris, review of No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, p. 199.

English Notes, fall, 1998, Kate Arneson, "Shakespeare's Sister and the Madwoman in the Attic: Updating the Literary Canon."

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), February 13, 1988, Janice Kulyk Keefer, review of The War of the Words.

Historian, summer, 2001, Lisa Phillips, review of Slacks and Calluses, p. 822.

Journal of American Studies, April, 1991, Peter Nicholls, review of No Man's Land, p. 101; August, 1995, Kate Fullbrook, review of Letters from the Front, p. 320.

Journal of the American Medical Association, November 8, 1995, John C. Kruse, review of Wrongful Death, p. 1478.

Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2005, review of Death's Door, p. 1171.

Lancet, September 2, 1995, Paul A. Volberding, review of Wrongful Death, p. 624.

Library Journal, June 1, 1995, Ellen Kaufmann, review of Ghost Volcano, p. 122; October 1, 2004, Doris Lynch, review of Belongings, p. 85; November 1, 2005, E. James Lieberman, review of Death's Door, p. 100; January 1, 2006, E. James Lieberman, "Q & A: Sandra M. Gilbert," p. 134.

London Review of Books, October 20, 1994, Elaine Showalter, review of No Man's Land, p. 36.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 2, 1980, Carolyn See, "Good-Girl, Bad-Woman Images of Madness," review of The Madwoman in the Attic, p. N6.

Modern Fiction Studies, winter, 1988, Elizabeth Boyd Thompson, review of The War of the Words, p. 747; winter, 1989, Elizabeth Boyd Thompson, review of Sexchanges, p. 867.

Modern Language Quarterly, March, 1996, Sydney Janet Kaplan, review of Letters from the Front, p. 115.

National Review, November 15, 1985, J.O. Tate, review of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, p. 48; October 28, 1988, Jane Larkin Crain, review of The War of the Words, p. 46.

New Statesman and Society, October 7, 1994, Helen Carr, review of Sexchanges, p. 45.

Newsweek, July 15, 1985, Laura Shapiro, review of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, p. 65.

New York Review of Books, May 31, 1990, Helen Hennessey Vendler, review of No Man's Land, p. 23.

New York Times Book Review, December 9, 1979, Le Anne Schreiber, review of The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 11; August 17, 1980, review of The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 27; February 7, 1988, Caryn James, "What's Bothering Virginia Woolf?" p. 12; February 7, 1988, Christine Froula, review of The War of the Words, p. 12; February 19, 1989, Walter Kendrick, review of Sexchanges, p. 9; March 12, 1989, Bruce Bennett, "Blood Pressure," p. 38; November 6, 1994, Mark Hussey, review of Letters from the Front, p. 27; March 19, 1995, James S. Kunen, review of Wrongful Death, p. 28.

Publishers Weekly, December 5, 1994, review of Wrongful Death, p. 59; March 27, 1995, review of Mothersongs, p. 79; May 29, 1995, review of Ghost Volcano, p. 78; June 26, 2000, review of Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems, 1969-1999, p. 72; October 17, 2005, review of Death's Door, p. 53.

Reference & Research Book News, August, 2007, review of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.

Review of English Studies, November, 1996, Judy Simons, review of Letters from the Front, p. 632.

Studies in the Novel, spring, 1989, Katherine Fishburn, review of The War of the Words, p. 104; winter, 1990, Katherine Fishburn, review of Sexchanges, p. 472.

Times Higher Education Supplement, February 17, 1995, Lorna Sage, review of Letters from the Front, p. 23.

Times Literary Supplement, August 8, 1980, review of The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 901; April 18, 1986, review of Emily's Bread: Poems, p. 430; June 3, 1988, Barbara Hardy, review of No Man's Land, p. 621; June 2, 1989, Terry Castle, review of Sexchanges, p. 607; June 30, 1995, Gillian Beer, review of Letters from the Front, p. 6; June 14, 1996, Elaine Showalter, review of Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic Melodrama, p. 9.

Washington Post Book World, November 25, 1979, Carolyn G. Heilbrun, review of The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 4; January 17, 1988, review of No Man's Land, p. 4.

Women's Review of Books, July, 1995, Lisa Alther, review of Wrongful Death, p. 18; July, 1995, Diane Wakoski, review of Ghost Volcano, p. 27; November, 2000, Rita Signorelli-Pappas, review of Kissing the Bread, pp. 16-17.

World Literature Today, summer, 1995, Sandra P. Cookson, review of Letters from the Front, p. 590.

ONLINE

Sandra M. Gilbert Home Page,http://sandramgilbert.com (November 19, 2007).

University of California, Davis, Department of English Web site,http://www.english.ucdavis.edu/ (November 19, 2007), curriculum vitae of Sandra M. Gilbert.

Writers at Cornell Web log,http://writersatcornell.blogspot.com/ (March 28, 2007), interview with Sandra M. Gilbert.