SOURCE: “The Madwoman in the Attic,” in Victorian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 4, Summer, 1980, pp. 505–07.

In the following essay, Auerbach commends Guber and Gilbert's “liberated” readings of nineteenth-century women writers in The Madwoman in the Attic.

Feminist criticism seemed to spring alive in the 1970s when Kate Millett's Sexual Politics smashed into patriarchal myths about womanhood; it is fitting that The Madwoman in the Attic should finish out the decade by recomposing this mythology in feminist terms. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's rich compendium of the images, fears, and dreams of power that haunted nineteenth-century woman writers is a definitive, if not totally consistent, study of the mythos of subversion out of which the woman's tradition arose.

The Madwoman in the Attic begins by indicting an overweening patriarchal culture that imposed Otherness on its women by forcing on them the twin myths of angel and monster. Though Gilbert and...