The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, co-authored by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, is a nonfiction scholarly text comprising 16 interconnected essays. Published in 1979, this lengthy volume is now widely considered a foundational text of feminist literary criticism. A second edition appeared in 2000 accompanied by a new Introduction by the authors that offers readers insight into Gilbert and Gubar’s decision to focus the work on the 19th century. The authors also respond to the social changes that have taken place in the 20 years between the first and second editions.

In the fall of 1973, Gilbert and Gubar met at the male-dominated English department at Indiana University; at this time, only four of Indiana’s 70 English professors were women. As born and bred New Yorkers, both women felt out of place in the Midwest, and they quickly became friends and collaborators. When they team-taught an English literature seminar course on women for seniors at Indiana University, they selected the texts for their course syllabus according to their own favorite women writers. Gilbert’s expertise in 20th-century poetry, Gubar’s training in the 18th-century novel, and their shared passion for the female writers of the 19th century enabled them to develop the lectures that became the foundation of The Madwoman in the Attic.

As the title suggests, the book examines writing by women who lived in England and the United States during the 19th century, as well as the unique circumstances in which each woman wrote. Specifically, Gilbert and Gubar explore the lives and the literary creations of five English novelists (Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot), two English poets (Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti) and one American poet (Emily Dickinson). In analyzing the similarities and specificities of these female writers’ lives and work, Gilbert and Gubar highlight the challenges women writers faced in Victorian patriarchal society, the impact family dynamics had on their writing, and the themes of imprisonment and escape in their work as reflections of the confinement women experienced in Victorian times.

Later writers like Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf also make appearances in the book, as do poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Male voices play a role in the book as well, and the work of Sigmund Freud, John Milton, and Harold Bloom all contribute to the discussion of the 19th-century female writers who are the mainstays of the text.

Because the content of The Madwoman in the Attic emerged from a series of university lectures for senior-level English majors, the writing presumes that the reader is already familiar with the writers and the texts mentioned in the book. The presumption of this prior knowledge means that Gilbert and Gubar do not provide any summary of the titles they discuss, nor do they offer background information when mentioning contemporary writers and critics who inform their discussion. The resulting text is rich in analytical detail and scholarly interpretation.