Maureen Corrigan on how Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar reinterpreted the literary canon when they wrote The Madwoman in the Attic:

The undercover female tradition that Gilbert and Gubar were talking about was one in which writers as disparate as Austen, Emily Dickinson, the Brontes, Louisa May Alcott, and George Eliot used similar themes and images to dramatize the social limitations they themselves suffered as women. Once you started looking for metaphors of confinement, Gilbert and Gubar demonstrated, you saw that novels like Frankenstein, Northanger Abbey and Middlemarch were jam-packed with images of locked rooms and closets, dungeons and enclosures, as well as overbearing patriarch-jailors.

Image of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar via The Washington Post

Maureen Corrigan on Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar and the seminal feminist book The Madwoman in the Attic:

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. The two were, then, young professors at Indiana University and had co-taught a course in women’s literature when they stumbled onto, what they called in their introduction, a “distinctively female literary tradition … which no one had yet defined in its entirety.” If the grandness of that claim sounds akin to something Harold Carter might have said when he discovered King Tut’s tomb, well, the buried literary treasure Gilbert and Gubar unearthed was, to many of us readers back then, every bit as dazzling.