Rooms of Our Own
by Susan Gubar
University of Illinois Press. 223 pages, $19.95 (paper)
SUSAN GUBAR is a professor of English at Indiana University, the recipient of several awards for writing and scholarship, and the co-author (with Sandra Gilbert) of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Her latest book, Rooms of Our Own, a novel that’s an homage to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, examines contemporary women’s issues as they relate to feminism, gender roles, literature, and education in the 21st century. The first-person narrator reflects on the feminist movement of the past fifty years, the costly and hard-fought gains, and the painful and humiliating losses. Women are no longer refused entrance to libraries, universities, or tenure-track positions, but the “nugget of truth” our narrator offers is that, while opportunities for women have increased, women still take care of the children and, later, the elderly parents, all the while carrying out the domestic chores.
