Nominated for 1979 National Book Critics Circle Award in Literature (on the earlier edition).

Runner-up for the 1980 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.

This pathbreaking book of feminist criticism is now reissued with a substantial new introduction by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar that reveals the origins of their revolutionary realization in the 1970s that "the personal was the political, the sexual was the textual."

"The classic argument for a women’s literary tradition."—Scott Heller, Chronicle of Higher Education

"The authors force us to take a new look at the grandes dames of English literature, and the result is that they will never seem quite the same again."—Le Anne Schreiber, New York Times Book Review

"Imperative reading."—Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Washington Post Book World

"A masterpiece."—Carolyn See, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"The Madwoman in the Attic, The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century, originally published in 1979, has long since become a classic, one of the most important works of literary criticism of the 20th century. This new edition contains an introduction titled "The Madwoman in the Academy" that is, quite simply, a delight to read, warmly witty, provocative, informative and illuminating."—Joyce Carol Oates, Princeton University

"A groundbreaking study of women writers. . . . The book brought the concerns of feminism to the study of female writers and presented the case for the existence of a distinctly feminine imagination."—Martin Arnold, The New York Times

"The authors are brilliant academics but they wear their erudition lightly. It remains imperative reading for those who want to understand better the grandes dames of English literature, and is still one of the most powerful pieces of writing from a feminist point of view. Argumentative, polemical, witty and thought-provoking, this is a book which will make the reader return to the original texts." —Yorkshire Post (Leeds)

"A feminist classic and still one of the best books on the female Victorian Writers."—Judith Shulevitz, New York Times Book Review

Sandra M. Gilbert, Distinguished Professor of of English Emerita at the University of California, Davis, is the author of seven collections of poetry: In the Fourth World (Alabama), The Summer Kitchen (the Heyeck Press), Emily’s Bread, Blood Pressure, Ghost Volcano and Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems 1969-1999 (the last four all from W. W. Norton), as well as, more recently, The Italian Collection (Depot Books). Belongings, her latest book of poems, appeared from Norton in 2005, and a prose work, Death’s Door: Modern Dying and The Ways We Grieve, was published by Norton in 2006.

Gilbert has also published a memoir, Wrongful Death (Norton) and an anthology of elegies, Inventions of Farewell (Norton), along with a number of critical works, including Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence (two editions, Cornell and Southern Illinois), and essays in journals ranging from Critical Inquiry and PMLA to Massachusetts Review, Kenyon Review, Partisan Review and others. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in such periodicals as Poetry, Field, the Ontario Review, Epoch, the American Poetry Review, American Scholar, the New Yorker, and elsewhere, as well as in a number of anthologies.

With Susan Gubar, a professor of English at Indiana University, Gilbert has coauthored The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th-century Literary Imagination, and No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the 20th Century, volumes 1, 2, and 3: The War of the Words, Sexchanges, and Letters from the Front (all from Yale University Press). In addition, Gilbert and Gubar have coedited Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets (Indiana) and The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: TheTraditions in English. With poet and novelist Diana O Hehir, they have also edited MotherSongs: Poems By, For, and About Mothers (Norton); with poet-critic Wendy Barker, Gilbert coedited The House Is Made of Poetry, a collection of essays on the work of prize-winning poet Ruth Stone..

A former president of the Modern Language Association, Gilbert was the first M. H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor of English at Cornell University in the spring of 2007; in the past she has also taught at Princeton, Indiana, and Stanford universities, as well as Cal. State, Hayward, and Williams College. She has been a recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, NEH, and Soros Foundation fellowships, and she has held residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Bellagio, and Bogliasco. With Susan Gubar, she was named a Ms. “Woman of the Year” in 1986 and (also with Gubar) one of USA Today’s “People Who Made a Difference” in 1985. In 1988 she was awarded a D. Litt. by Wesleyan University, and in 1990, she was (with Karl Shapiro) a corecipient of the International Poetry Forum’s Charity Randall Award. More recently, she has won a Patterson Prize (for Ghost Volcano), an American Book Award (for Kissing the Bread), the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry (from the Italian-American Foundation), the Premio Lerici Pea awarded by the Liguri nel Mondo association, and several awards from Poetry Magazine.. In 2004 she was awarded the degree of Doctor Philosophiae Honoris Causa by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Susan Gubar, a Distinguished Professor of English and Women's Studies has taught at Indiana University for more than twenty years. Along with Sandra M. Gilbert, she published The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th-Century Literary Imagination in 1979, a runner-up for both The Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Six years later, in 1985, the collaborators received a Ms. Woman of the Year award for their compilation of the Norton Anthology of Literature of Women, a work that appeared in a revised second edition in 1996. Gilbert and Gubar also followed up The Madwoman with a critical trilogy entitled No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century: The War of the Words (1988), Sexchanges (1989), and Letters from the Front (1994) use feminist criticism to understand the achievements of British and American literary women in modern times. Gilbert and Gubar's most recent jointly-authored enterprises consist of a collection of poetry for and about mothers, MotherSongs (Norton, 1995), and a satire on the current state of literacy and cultural literacy, Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic Melodrama (Rutgers, 1995).

In 2006, Susan Gubar published Rooms of Our Own, which won an Honorable Mention award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights and in 2007, with Sandra M. Gilbert, she published a third edition of the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women as well as a Norton Reader of Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism. Her cultural biography of Judas, the twelfth apostle, will be published by W. W. Norton in 2009.

The recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation, Susan Gubar published a book on the centrality of cross-racial masquerade in American fiction, photography, painting, and film: Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (Oxford, 1997). She recently put together a collection of her essays in a book, Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century, which was published by Columbia University Press in 2000. She spent a year as a Laurence S. Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values to complete Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew, which was published by Indiana University in 2003. The recipient in 2003 of The Faculty Mentor Award from IU's Graduate Professional Student Organization, Susan Gubar continues to work with undergraduate and graduate students interested in critical race and gender issues in twentieth-century British and North American cultural contexts.