[In the following review, Bernikow admires the way Gubar and Gilbert support their arguments in The Madwoman in the Attic.]

[The Madwoman in the Attic] is long, rich, and brilliant. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, their voices blended, the seams mended, write as one, and that one sees deeply into literature. They shed light on the relationship between 19th-century women living imprisoned in men's houses and female writers of the time imprisoned in masculine texts. They look closely, anatomizing the work of Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson.

The authors have a big picture: the effect of life on art, archetypes of the female imagination, the meaning of recurrent images of enclosure and madwomen in attics. And they have infinite detail: close reading of Charlotte Brontë's novels, a chapter for each; careful treading through Dickinson's poems. These readings are subtle, entwined—take time to read, return to the original, read again. On Brontë's Villette, especially, they open doors. The section on “white” imagery in Dickinson's life and poems takes off like a jazz riff. White, they begin, frequently represents white heat and polar cold. Both. They spin this thread of thinking, stop, spin another.

Many feminists have been waiting for someone to counter Freudian critic Harold Bloom's “anxiety of influence” theory of literature. Against his theory of how (male) writers enact struggles with their literary fathers in order to create, Gubar and Gilbert posit an “anxiety of authorship” to describe what happens to women writers. They speak of “dis-ease” and “infection in the sentence” as the literary manifestations of female anxiety. This is a piercingly articulate chapter, provocative and hearty.

Having The Madwoman in the Attic at hand is like having a good friend nearby. She is enormously well read, sharp, visionary in what she sees when she reads a book. You love to talk with her. You thank her for what she shows you; you always come back to her; count on her insights; and you like her enormously.