Career
She is best known for co-authoring, with Sandra M., a standard feminist text, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979) and a trilogy on women"s writing in the 20th century. Gubar joined the faculty of Indiana University in 1973, at a time when there were three female professors among the 70 in its English department. Gubar and edited the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, published in 1985 ().
Its publication resulted in both of them being included among Mississippi"s women of the year in 1986.
Her book Judas: A Biography, was published in 2009 by West.W. Norton (). In December 2009, Gubar retired from Indiana at age 65, due to complications following from a November 2008 diagnosis of advanced ovarian cancer.
The "wrenching story" of her subsequent medical treatment (in which she underwent a "debulking" surgery which included the removal of her appendix, uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, and part of her intestines) led her to write Memoir of a Debulked Woman (2012, ). She continues her story as a blogger in "Living with Cancer" for the New York Times.