The recent death of Sandra M. Gilbert at the age of 87 sent my mind reeling back decades to the first time I came across her name. With Susan Gubar (who still lives), Gilbert wrote The Madwoman in the Attic:…

Judith Pamela Butler, that’s her name, represents everything that is wrong with the world. In any minimally enlightened era, her subjectivist quackery would have died in academic ostracism, the extravagance of the departmental loony in some remote and decadent university….