Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, from “Shut Up in Prose: Gender and Genre in Austen’s Juvenilia” [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 reprinted here, Gilbert and Gubar interpret Austen’s Northanger Abbey as more than just a parody of gothic tropes. Instead they see the novel itself as a “gothic story” that explores what happens “when a woman is made to disregard her personal sense of danger” and to “accept as real what contradicts her perception of her own situation.”

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, from “Shut Up in Prose: Gender and Genre in Austen’s Juvenilia” [from The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination]