Sandra M Gilbert, who together with Susan Gubar wrote the groundbreaking feminist classic "The Madwoman in the Attic", has passed away at the age of 87, writes The New York Times.
The book was published in 1979 and analyzes the literary strategies used by, among others, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Emily Dickinson in a patriarchal world. "The Madwoman in the Attic" became a widely used concept, and is taken from Charlotte Brontë's book "Jane Eyre". There, the angelic governess Jane notices more and more of a confined "mad" woman in the attic: as a symbol for everything women are not allowed to be.
"Even the most apparently conservative female authors create compulsively strong independent individuals who try to destroy the patriarchal structures that both their authors and their submissive heroines seem to accept as inevitable", wrote Gilbert and Gubar.
The duo's last book together was "Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination" (2021), which they wrote after Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016 over Hillary Clinton.
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