Co-author of the Madwoman in the Attic dies

Sandra Gilbert, co-author of the 1979 book The Madwoman in the Attic, died aged 87, on 10th November 2024. Gilbert wrote the seminal literary criticism second wave feminist text with Susan Grubar. It explores how 19th century female writers such as Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott and the Brontes, used similar imagery and female characters embodying madness and rebellion, to resist oppression and to demonstrate the social limitations the authors experienced as women.

Maureen Corrigan wrote about the Madwoman in 2013, when the National Book Critics Circle announced that Gilbert and Gubar were to receive its Lifetime Achievement Award:

To read The Madwoman in the Attic the first time round was thrilling — as though you’d been introduced to a secret code in women’s literature, hiding in plain sight…

Once you started looking at metaphors of confinement, Gilbert and Gubar demonstrated, you saw that novels like Frankenstein, Northanger Abbey and Middlemarch were jampacked with images of locked rooms and closets, dungeons and enclosures, as well as overbearing patriarch jailors. Also running through 19th century women’s novels and poetry were out-of-control characters, “maddened doubles [who] functioned as asocial surrogates for [more] docile [female] selves.” The most famous example of one of these doubles gave Gilbert and Gubar’s book its catch title: howling Bertha Rochester, imprisoned in her husband’s attic, giving vent to the forbidden feminist anger of plain Jane Eyre.

I borrowed a copy of the Madwoman in the Attic from the library in the early 2000s. It served as an instructive accompaniment to the stacks of 19th century classics I was reading at the time.

Gilbert and Grubar went on to become long term collaborators doing the necessary work of illuminating women’s lives through writing.

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