Books, Arts & Manners: Madwomen in the Attic

No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Vol. I: The War of the Words, by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (Yale, 320 pp., $22.95)

Some twenty years ago, I overheard several black students at my alma mater arguing over the dates of the French Revolution. After a bit of fruitless controversy, one of them settled the matter by exclaiming, “Oh, what difference does it make? They’re all white centuries anyway!”