Letters from the Front is the final volume of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s trilogy No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century.¹ It succeeds The War of the Words (1988) and Sexchanges (1989), and, like them, is a deeply exasperating book, containing some good literary criticism and much cultural-historical nonsense. Virginia Woolf must take her share of the blame for the latter, on account of her invention in A Room of One’s Own, cited in The War of the Words, of the “man’s sentence”:

All the great novelists like Thackeray and Dickens and Balzac have written a natural prose, swift but not slovenly, expressive but not precious, taking their own tint without ceasing to be common property. They have based it on the sentence that was current at the time. The sentence that was current at the beginning of the nineteenth century ran something like this perhaps: “The grandeur of their works was an argument with them, not to stop short, but to proceed. They could have no higher excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their art and endless generations of truth and beauty. Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success.” That is a man’s sentence; behind it one can see Johnson, Gibbon and the rest. It was a sentence that was unsuited for a woman’s use.

Taken literally, such a