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

An analysis of Victorian women writers, this pathbreaking book of feminist literary criticism is now reissued with a substantial new introduction by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar that reveals the origins of their revolutionary realization in the 1970s that “the personal was the political, the sexual was the textual.”

Contents:
The Queen’s looking glass: female creativity, male images of women, and the metaphor of literary paternity —
Infection in the sentence: the women writer and the anxiety of authorship —
The parables of the cave —
Shut up in prose: gender and genre in Austen’s Juvenilia —
Jane Austen’s cover story (and its secret agents) —
Milton’s bogey: patriarchal poetry and women readers —
Horror’s twin: Mary Shelley’s monstrous Eve —
Looking oppositely: Emily Brontë’s bible of hell —
A secret, inward wound: The professor’s pupil —
A dialogue of self and soul: plain Jane’s progress —
The genesis of hunger, according to Shirley —
The buried life of Lucy Snowe —
Made keen by loss: George Eliot’s veiled vision —
George Eliot as the angel of destruction —
The aesthetics of renunciation —
A woman, white: Emily Dickinson’s yarn of pearl.