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

by Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Lisa Appignanesi (Introduction)

Overview

"A feminist classic."—Judith Shulevitz, New York Times Book Review

“A pivotal book, one of those after which we will never think the same again.”—Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Washington Post Book World

A pathbreaking book of literary criticism is now reissued with a new introduction by Lisa Appignanesi that speaks to how The Madwoman in the Attic set the groundwork for subsequent generations of scholars writing about women writers, and why the book still feels fresh some four decades later.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300246728
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	03/17/2020
Series:	Veritas Paperbacks
Pages:	744
Sales rank:	269,333
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 2.10(d)

About the Author

Sandra M. Gilbert is distinguished professor of English emerita at the University of California, Davis. Susan Gubar is distinguished emerita professor of English and women’s studies at Indiana University. Together, they were awarded the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Book Critics Circle. Lisa Appignanesi is the chair of the Royal Society of Literature.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Veritas Paperback Edition Lisa Appignanesi xi

Preface to the First Edition xvii

Part I Toward a Feminist Poetics

1 The Queen's Looking Glass: Female Creativity, Male Images of Women, and the Metaphor of Literary Paternity 3

2 Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship 45

3 The Parables of the Cave 93

Part II Inside the House of Fiction: Jane Austen's Tenants of Possibility

4 Shut Up in Prose: Gender and Genre in Austen's Juvenilia 107

5 Jane Austen's Cover Story (and Its Secret Agents) 146

Part III How Are We Fal'n?: Milton's Daughters

6 Milton's Bogey: Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers 187

7 Horror's Twin: Mary Shelley's Monstrous Eve 213

8 Looking Oppositely: Emily Bronte's Bible of Hell 248

Part IV The Spectral Selves of Charlotte Bronte

9 A Secret, Inward Wound: The Professor's. Pupil 311

10 A Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plain Jane's Progress 336

11 The Genesis of Hunger, According to Shirley 372

12 The Buried Life of Lucy Snowe 399

Part V Captivity and Consciousness in George Eliot's Fiction

13 Made Keen by Loss: George Eliot's Veiled Vision 443

14 George Eliot as the Angel of Destruction 478

Part VI Strength in Agony: Nineteenth-Century Poetry by Women

15 The Aesthetics of Renunciation 539

16 A Woman-White: Emily Dickinson's Yarn of Pearl 581

Notes 651

Index 699