The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination

The Byronic hero is a kind of anti-hero whose dark temper and rebellious attitudes are intriguing despite their unpleasantness. The Byronic hero’s psychological complexity is part of his, or her, appeal, and the realistic nature of this hero’s temperament sets him or her apart from other kinds of literary heroes. George Gordon Byron, the Romantic poet better known as Lord Byron, is responsible for the existence of the term; both the protagonist Childe Harold, of Byron’s epic poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and Lord Byron himself are widely accepted by scholars as the original Byronic heroes. Edward Rochester of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Heathcliff of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights are popular examples of Byronic heroes.

Feminism is the belief that men and women are equal and should therefore have the same rights and opportunities in social, professional, personal, economic, and political spheres. In 1968, journalist Martha Weinmen Lear used the word “wave” to describe a new iteration of the feminist movement in the United States; second-wave feminism, as the post-suffrage feminist movement is known, is the feminism of the late 1960s and 1970s, the time period in which Gilbert and Gubar studied and discussed the ideas contained in The Madwoman in the Attic. 

Romanticism was an artistic movement in Europe during the 18th century; many scholars believe that the Romantic movement peaked during the first half of the 1800s. This movement influenced writers, artists, composers, and other intellectuals who lived by the Romantic ideals of subjectivity, individuality, and freedom from the confinement of rules. Romanticists also believed in the superiority of the imagination over reason as well as the deep significance of beauty, nature, and the sublime. Mary Shelley and her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, are key figures of the Romantic movement in Britain.