Charlotte Brontë's character Bertha (Rochester's previous wife) in Jane Eyre inspires the title and content of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's text, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. This piece of criticism shifted the focus of feminist literary criticism from examining representations of women in literature by men to literature by women, and was immensely popular. The Madwoman in the Attic analyzed women writing through a social and historical lense, and viewed it as a form of establishing identity. Though it is sometimes criticized as "racist and heterosexist", the influence of The Madwoman in the Attic remains far-reaching, even today. Many have argued that it has allowed for a more close consideration of gender presentations in previous canon texts, such as Milton's Paradise Lost.

Works Cited: Gezari, Janet. “Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic.” Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism, vol. 56, no. 3, July 2006, pp. 264–279. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1093/escrit/cgl003.

STERNLIEB, LISA. “Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic After Thirty Years.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 44, no. 1, 2012, pp. 114–116. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1353/sdn.2012.0000