The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination

Susan Gubar is an author and professor of English literature at Indiana University. Her recent publications include a memoir recording her experience with ovarian cancer titled Memoir of a Debulked Woman. Together with Sandra M. Gilbert, she has co-authored and co-edited 11 scholarly texts. She lives in Bloomington, Indiana.

Jane Austen (1775-1817) was a British novelist. She is credited with the modernization of the novel genre because she examined the lives of ordinary, middle-class people in her six novels. Austen’s novels explore notions of marriage and the position of women in 19th-century society. She never married.  

Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was a British novelist of the Romantic period. Her best-known work is Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, which many scholars consider to be the first work of speculative fiction. She was married to Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and she edited much of her husband’s poetry and prose. 

Emily Brontë (1818-1848) was a British novelist and poet. She is remembered for her novel Wuthering Heights, a highly dramatic work set against the Yorkshire moors. Thomas Newby published the work under the pseudonym Ellis Bell the year before she died, and on some editions of Wuthering Heights, the author is wrongly identified as the creator of Jane Eyre, which was written by Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë’s sister. 

Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) was a British novelist and poet. The most famous of the three novels she wrote that were published during her lifetime, Jane Eyre, is the work in which the original madwoman in the attic, Bertha Rochester, appears. She also wrote poetry under the pseudonym Currer Bell with her sisters, Emily Brontë and Anne Brontë, also known as Ellis Bell and Acton Bell. 

George Eliot (1819-1880) is the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans, a British novelist, poet, and journalist. Her five novels are admired for their keen psychological analysis, a trait of modern fiction she pioneered in works like Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. Eliot’s personal life was famously unconventional, as evidenced by a 23-year-long partnership with a married man and a late-in-life marriage to man 20 years her junior.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was an American poet. She lived as a recluse on her family’s property for her whole adult life, accompanied by her sister, Lavinia, and she wrote volumes of poetry in secret. Dickinson’s innovative poems were published only when her sister happened upon her work after her death.