Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The madwoman in the attic

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 Brontës, 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