The writer was also a renowned academic and poet as well as being one of the leading figures of second wave feminism
Sandra Gilbert, the American poet and literary critic who co-authored the landmark second wave feminist text The Madwoman in the Attic, has died aged 87.
“The western canon was not liberated overnight, but Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar certainly stuck a wedge firmly into the frat house door when they wrote The Madwoman in the Attic,”Born 27 December, 1936 in New York City, Gilbert grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens and attended Hunter College high school, Manhattan. She studied for a bachelor’s degree in English literature at Cornell University, where she met Elliot Gilbert, then a PhD student, who she married in 1957.
Gilbert began teaching at California State University, and published a book on DH Lawrence’s poetry, Acts of Attention, in 1972. She then taught for a brief period at Indiana University, where she met Gubar in a lift. The pair were soon asked to design a course on female writers, which they called The Madwoman in the Attic – a reference to Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Studying the works of these writers, Gilbert and Gubar were “surprised by the coherence of theme and imagery” they encountered. “Images of enclosure and escape, fantasies in which maddened doubles functioned as asocial surrogates for docile selves, metaphors of physical discomfort manifested in frozen landscapes and fiery interiors – such patterns recurred throughout this tradition,” they wrote in the book’s preface.
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