Sandra M. Gilbert, a critic, scholar, poet and co-author of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, "a groundbreaking work of literary criticism that became a feminist classic," died November 10 at age 87, the New York Times reported. Gilbert was also the author of eight books of poetry, including Judgment Day (2018) and Aftermath (2011), as well as the memoir Wrongful Death: A Medical Tragedy (1995).
Written by Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic was published in 1979 and became a bestseller. "With gusto, scholarly rigor and flashes of humor, the authors dug into the macho ethos that had long dominated literature," the Times wrote. "Their breakthrough was to uncover the narrative strategies that Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Dickinson and others deployed to gain literary autonomy and to protest an oppressive literary patriarchy."
Gilbert, whose specialty was 20th-century literature, and Gubar, an 18th-century specialist, met as new English professors at Indiana University in 1973. They decided to teach classics by women of the 19th and 20th centuries in a course called "The Madwoman in the Attic."
"It felt like discovering an uncharted country," Gubar recalled.
In 1985, they co-edited The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, a 2,457-page work spanning seven centuries, and a year later Ms. magazine named them Women of the Year. Gilbert and Gubar edited the three-volume No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, whose final volume appeared in 1994.
Their most recent book, Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination (2021), was written after Hillary Clinton's loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. "If the culture is still changing," they wrote in the introduction, "why are we and so many of our friends still mad?... Maybe if you shatter glass ceilings, you have to walk on broken glass. Maybe if you lean in, you topple over."
Gubar said their favorite collaboration was Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic Melodrama (1995), a play that spoofed academia and the culture wars.
Gilbert retired from U.C. Davis in 2005 as a distinguished professor emerita. In 2012, she and Gubar won the National Book Critics Circle lifetime achievement award.
Gubar observed: "Sandra brought poetry to our collaboration. She never pontificated, either as a critic or a poet or a teacher or a feminist. It was just not in her nature. Instead, she would draw upon lyricism and a visceral response to literature to articulate the fears and hopes of her generation."
