Vlada Roslyakova by Pierluigi Maco for Vogue China (January 2007).
If you are interested in gender, gothic writing, and fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is a book that should be at the very top of your To Read list (as well as Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Becoming The Villainess - write that down). It is one of those titles that cannot be avoided in certain circles and frankly, it is a miracle that I didn’t read it sooner.
Libby Masters (“Masters of Sex”).
I came across this tiny little book in an antiques store in West Kirby and the second I laid eyes on it I knew that I had to have it (and the owner gave it to me for free because sometimes the world is wonderful like that). I’d been curious about Patricia Highsmith’s work for some time, the title is hilarious, and the serenely smiling 1950’s housewife on the cover made it even better.
“Penny Dreadful” still.
“It would not be too much to say that Anglo-American feminist criticism barely existed before [Gilbert and Gubar] rocked literary studies.”
Deborah D. Rogers, The Times Higher Education.
In 1979, Susan Gubar and Sandra M. Gilbert published The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, a hallmark of second-wave feminist criticism. Over 700 pages long, The Madwoman in the Attic presents an analysis of a trope found in 19th-century literature. Gilbert and Gubar proposed that all female characters in male-authored novels can be categorised as either an angel or a monster; women in fiction were either pure and submissive or sensual, rebellious, and uncontrollable (very undesirable qualities in a Victorian daughter/mother/wife).