SOURCE: A review of The Madwoman in the Attic, in Ms., Vol. 8, No. 8, February, 1980, p. 39.

In the following review, Bernikow admires the way Gubar and Gilbert support their arguments in The Madwoman in the Attic.

[The Madwoman in the Attic] is long, rich, and brilliant. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, their voices blended, the seams mended, write as one, and that one sees deeply into literature. They shed light on the relationship between 19th-century women living imprisoned in men's houses and female writers of the time imprisoned in masculine texts. They look closely, anatomizing the work of Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson.

The authors have a big picture: the effect of life on art, archetypes of the female imagination, the meaning of recurrent images of enclosure and madwomen in attics. And they have infinite detail: close reading of Charlotte Brontë's novels...