An Analysis of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic - The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination

The 1979 publication of Susan Gubar and Sandra M. Gilbert-s ground-breaking study The Madwoman in the Attic marked a founding moment in feminist literary history as much as feminist literary theory. In their extensive study of nineteenth-century women-s writing, Gubar and Gilbert offer radical re-readings of Jane Austen, the Bront- Emily Dickinson, George Eliot and Mary Shelley tracing a distinctive female literary tradition and female literary aesthetic. Gubar and Gilbert raise questions about canonisation that continue to resonate today, and model the revolutionary importance of re-reading influential texts that may seem all too familiar