Sandra Gilbert, the American poet and literary critic who co-authored the landmark second wave feminist textual content The Madwoman within the Attic, has died aged 87.
The 1979 e book – written with Susan Gubar, who would turn out to be a longtime collaborator of Gilbert’s – explored the best way that feminine writers of the nineteenth century used photographs and characters embodying insanity and revolt, representing a rejection of oppression.
“The western canon was not liberated in a single day, however Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar actually caught a wedge firmly into the frat home door after they wrote The Madwoman within the Attic,” mentioned the critic Maureen Corrigan in 2013.
Gilbert died in hospital on 10 November from end-stage power obstructive pulmonary illness, reported the New York Instances.
Born 27 December, 1936 in New York Metropolis, Gilbert grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens and attended Hunter School highschool, Manhattan. She studied for a bachelor’s diploma in English literature at Cornell College, the place she met Elliot Gilbert, then a PhD scholar, who she married in 1957.
The couple spent a yr in Germany whereas Elliot served within the military, earlier than Gilbert pursued a grasp’s at NYU and a PhD at Columbia College, which she accomplished in 1968.
Gilbert started educating at California State College, and revealed a e book on DH Lawrence’s poetry, Acts of Consideration, in 1972. She then taught for a short interval at Indiana College, the place she met Gubar in a elevate. The pair had been quickly requested to design a course on feminine writers, which they referred to as The Madwoman within the Attic – a reference to Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
In 1976, Gilbert moved on to show at UC Davis, although she continued to work with Gubar from afar, placing collectively the manuscript for The Madwoman within the Attic, which was revealed in 1979 by Yale College Press. The e book explored the works of Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Mary Shelley and George Eliot amongst others.
Finding out the works of those writers, Gilbert and Gubar had been “shocked by the coherence of theme and imagery” they encountered. “Pictures of enclosure and escape, fantasies during which maddened doubles functioned as asocial surrogates for docile selves, metaphors of bodily discomfort manifested in frozen landscapes and fiery interiors – such patterns recurred all through this custom,” they wrote within the e book’s preface.
Studying The Madwoman within the Attic for the primary time was “thrilling”, wrote Corrigan in 2013. “As if you’d been launched to a secret code in girls’s literature, hiding in plain sight.”
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Gilbert and Gubar would go on to co-author additional works, together with No Man’s Land, their three-volume examine of Twentieth-century works by girls, and most lately Nonetheless Mad, revealed in 2021. They obtained the Ivan Sandrof lifetime achievement award from the Nationwide Ebook Critics Circle in 2012.
Between 1985 and 1989, Gilbert was a professor of English at Princeton College. She additionally wrote 9 books of poetry, revealed between 1979 and 2011, in addition to works of memoir and non-fiction. In her 1995 e book Wrongful Demise, she wrote about Elliot’s dying following surgical procedure in 1991.
Gilbert is survived by her three kids, Roger, Katherine, and Susanna, and her companion Dick Frieden.
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