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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 1979 book – written with Susan Gubar, who would become a longtime collaborator of Gilbert’s – explored the way that female writers of the 19th century used images and characters embodying madness and rebellion, representing a rejection of oppression.
“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,” said the critic Maureen Corrigan in 2013.
Gilbert died in hospital on 10 November from end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, reported the New York Times.
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.
The couple spent a year in Germany while Elliot served in the army, before Gilbert pursued a master’s at NYU and a PhD at Columbia University, which she completed in 1968.
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.
In 1976, Gilbert moved on to teach at UC Davis, though she continued to work with Gubar from afar, putting together the manuscript for The Madwoman in the Attic, which was published in 1979 by Yale University Press. The book explored the works of Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Mary Shelley and George Eliot among others.
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.
Reading The Madwoman in the Attic for the first time was “thrilling”, wrote Corrigan in 2013. “As though you’d been introduced to a secret code in women’s literature, hiding in plain sight.”
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Gilbert and Gubar would go on to co-author further works, including No Man’s Land, their three-volume study of 20th-century works by women, and most recently Still Mad, published in 2021. They received the Ivan Sandrof lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle in 2012.
Between 1985 and 1989, Gilbert was a professor of English at Princeton University. She also wrote nine books of poetry, published between 1979 and 2011, as well as works of memoir and non-fiction. In her 1995 book Wrongful Death, she wrote about Elliot’s death following surgery in 1991.
Gilbert is survived by her three children, Roger, Katherine, and Susanna, and her partner Dick Frieden.
