The MLA celebrates the life of Sandra Gilbert, an internationally renowned critic, poet, and educator, who died on 10 November 2024 in Berkeley, California. A giant of feminist literary theory and a beloved professor, Gilbert shaped the minds of countless students and scholars for more than five decades.
Gilbert was born in New York City in 1936. She graduated with a BA from Cornell University and went on to earn an MA from New York University and a PhD in English literature from Columbia University in 1968. After receiving her PhD, Gilbert taught at California State University, Hayward, and at Indiana University before landing at the University of California, Davis, in 1976. Gilbert left UC Davis in 1985 to become C. Barnwell Straut Chair of English at Princeton University but returned to UC Davis four years later, eventually retiring in 2005 as distinguished professor emerita.
A master of multiple literary genres, Gilbert published eight books of poetry, multiple volumes of literary theory, and a memoir. She is perhaps best known for her landmark work of feminist criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, which she coauthored with Susan Gubar and published in 1979. The Madwoman in the Attic remains a staple of literature classes, and Gilbert and Gubar continued to work together over the years, cowriting several more books and coediting The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism.
Gilbert was widely acclaimed as one of the most influential theorists of her generation, receiving honorary degrees from Wesleyan University in 1988, Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2004, and Harvard University in 2017 in recognition of her pioneering scholarship. She was awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation and became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997.
An active member of the MLA, Gilbert joined the organization in 1961 and was elected second vice president in 1994. She became the president of the organization in 1996, and you can read “Shadows of Futurity: The Literary Imagination, the MLA, and the Twenty-First Century,” the presidential address Gilbert gave at the 1996 MLA Annual Convention.