AQA (A): Paper 1 Love through the ages
Since 1979 it has been almost universally agreed among critics of Jane Eyre that Bertha Mason, Rochester’s ‘deranged’ wife, is an avatar of Jane’s unruly, unresolved desires and fears. This view was first proposed by the American critics Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their book The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (1979). Many students have assumed that, because the first half of the title so unambiguously recalls Jane Eyre, that novel must be the main focus of the whole study, and so the second part of that imposing title has been largely neglected. But Gilbert and Gubar range over many important women writers: Emily as well as Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, George Eliot and Emily Dickinson, with insights into others besides.
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