The Madwoman in the Attic

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination is an important work of feminist literary criticism by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.

The title refers to a character from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre: Bertha Mason, a mad "creole" woman, kept locked in the attic of her husband's mansion. Bertha, although she rarely appears in the novel, haunts it and drives much of the action. Gilbert and Gubar also examined works by Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson.

Editions

• 1979 Yale University Press
• 2000 (2d ed Yale Nota Bene press