Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

Critical Essay by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

SOURCE: Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. “Made Keen by Loss: George Eliot's Veiled Vision.” In The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, pp. 443-77. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1979.

In the following essay, Gilbert and Gubar examine Eliot's place in Gothic female literary tradition, elucidate autobiographical aspects of “The Lifted Veil,” and provide a feminist perspective on the story.

In Eden Females sleep the winter in soft silken veils Woven by their own hands to hide them in the darksom grave. But Males immortal live renewed by female deaths.

—William Blake

… good sense and good taste invariably dispose women who have made extraordinary attainments in any of the abstract sciences, to draw a veil over them to common observers, as not according well with the more appropriate accomplishments of their sex …

—Dugald Stewart

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