Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, from “Jane Austen’s Cover Story (and Its Secret Agents)” [from The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination]
The Madwoman in the Attic, by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, has been a landmark book of feminist literary criticism since its 1979 publication. In the selection reproduced here, Gilbert and Gubar argue that, while on the surface Austen’s plots appear to reinforce notions of female subordination to men, the novels can be read more deeply as depictions of women navigating the challenges posed by patriarchal power structures. Austen, whose own writing career contradicted gender norms, thus “describes both her own dilemma and, by extension, that of all women who experience themselves as divided, caught in the contradiction between their status as human beings and their vocation as females.”