Sandra M. Gilbert

Sandra M. Gilbert is a leading feminist literary critic and renowned poet who has published numerous collections of poetry, including the Patterson Prize winning Ghost Volcano (1997), and Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems 1969–1999, which won an American Book Award. Recent collections include Belongings (2006) and Aftermath: Poems (2011). Gilbert’s interest in elegy, grieving, and literary representations of loss have continued to inform her work in books like Inventions of Farewell (2001), an anthology of elegies which she edited, and Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve (2006), a cultural and literary history of grief. Gilbert is also well known for her work with the scholar Susan Gubar. The two cowrote The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), considered one of the most influential works of feminist scholarship of the 20th century. Gilbert and Gubar also produced a three-volume series titled No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Gilbert died at the age of eighty-seven on November 10, 2024.