Brooks's close reading is typical of the New Critical investment in the textual object alone. Yet scholars have also found close reading productive for more politically and socially invested work, thereby refusing the New Critical belief in literary transcendence while seizing on the care with which it treated textuality. In "The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination" (1979), best known as one of the earliest statements of feminist literary criticism, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar deployed close reading to make a case for the distinctiveness of the female literary imagination. The sixteen chapters of "Madwoman" thus pursue their arguments—that women writers expressed their anxiety about authorship, their rage over being constrained to docile femininity, their canny encoding of their patriarchal critique—with the attention to language, imagery, and form Gilbert and Gubar had been trained to wield as graduate students in the late 1960s. New Critical echoes are thus evident in the individual chapters devoted to close readings of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights", Charlotte Bronte's "The Professor", "Jane" "Eyre", "Shirley", and "Villette", but so is the political innovation. Reviewers—academic and mainstream—recognized this trait, describing the two scholars as “gnostic heretics who claim to have found the secret code that unlocks the mysteries in old texts” (Schreiber 11) and their interpretations as a "skillful joint peeling away of the layers" of women's writing" (129).