The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination, by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, is one of the ur-texts of feminist literary criticism, and, as such, you'll have read a response or reaction to it in just about any later work on the subject. It's always nice to go back to these books, even if they're a little outdated or overexposed, as long as you can try to approach it with fresh eyes and an open mind (do not be that guy who won't read Tolkein because he's too derivative). In this case, I've read chapters and excerpts of Madwoman, but never the whole thing at a go before.
One (make that two) caveat(s) -- it definitely helped that at this point in my life I've also read most of the major (literary -- definitely not all the scholarly) works to which Gilbert and Grubar refer. While they do a good job of summarizing each important work and giving detailed criticism, there are definitely arguments that are more easily absorbed if you already know the whole story. Also, my library did not send me the most recent version of the text, which the internet informs me has an all-new introduction (and is for some reason not sold in India).
Madwoman is, at its heart, about the difficulty of being a woman writer in a world where the pen is an extension of the penis. Ever since patriarchal religions posited a male Creator, the right of small-c creation has been in the hands of men. For early women writers, there is a social aspect of fighting to be considered capable of writing, but there's also an internal aspect of considering oneself capable. Then, too, there's the aesthetic challenge of creating an authentic woman character, one who evades the characterization of woman as the angel of the house or/and hell from the waist down.
The nineteenth-century solution was doubling -- creating two characters that approach authenticity from each side of the patriarchal coin, then holding them up next to each other so that, with the right lenses on, you can just make out the 3D image of a real woman. The titlular example would be Jane Eyre as contrasted with Bertha Mason Rochester, but I'm sure you can think of dozens of them, and so can Gilbert and Grubar. Like all good critics, they're willing to delve into the juvenalia and letters (so we don't have to), and they come up with just scads of examples.
Madwomen also incorporates (cautiously) Bloom's 'anxiety of influence' theory by observing in many nineteenth-century women authors an occasional fascination with Milton and Paradise Lost. Milton is the poet to beat, of course, and extraordinarily difficult for a woman to challenge on his own ground -- Eve, Satan, the Fall of Man, all that kind of thing. The readings here on Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights are particularly strong and engaging; not that I always entirely agree, but well worth thinking about.
Apart from the Milton digression and a chapter on women poets (mostly Dickinson (complete with a hilarious comparison of Dickinson and Whitman), with a smattering of Browning and Rosetti) at the end, the sections of Madwomen are mostly reserved for detailed criticism of three major authors -- Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. I love and reread these authors on a regular basis, and even I thought these chapters occasionally bogged down with too much detail and a little bit of repetition. Not that you shouldn't read them! But maybe read them one at a time, with a fair break in between for digestion.
Of course, if being too thorough is the worst criticism I can come up with, you probably have a good idea of why this is such a seminal (heh) text. Oh, I can come up with a few more quibbles if I try -- sometimes there's a bit of whimsically overextended metaphor that doesn't quite parse, and there's a tendency to dismiss whole swathes of women's literature as not 'real literature' because it hasn't stood the test of time without questioning just why (hint - patriarchy) it hasn't -- but the fact is that this is still a valid, solid work that deserves a full reading.
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