In Conversation: On The Mad Women’s Ball: A Novel & Mrs. March: A Novel

Sandra M. Gilbert is a distinguished literary critic, poet, and professor emerita at the University of California, Davis. She is also the author of Judgment Day: Poems, and co-author – with Susan Gubar – of the classic feminist text The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Forty years after collaborating on that groundbreaking work of feminist literary theory, Gilbert and Gubar map the literary history of feminism’s second wave in Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination (W. W. Norton & Company). Together they trace the evolution of feminist literature from its stirrings in the midcentury – when Sylvia Plath, Betty Friedan, and Joan Didion found their voices and Diane di Prima, Lorraine Hansberry, and Audre Lorde discovered community in rebellion – to a resurgence in the new millennium with the writings of Alison Bechdel, Claudia Rankine, and N. K. Jemisin. Gilbert and Gubar offer lucid, compassionate, and piercing readings of major works, and examine the overlapping terrain of literature and politics in a comprehensive portrait of an expanding movement.

Susan Gubar is a memoirist, literary critic, and professor emerita at Indiana University. She is the author of Late-Life Love: A Memoir; the co-editor, with Sandra M. Gilbert, of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English; and co-author, again with Gilbert, of the classic feminist text The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Forty years after collaborating on that groundbreaking work of feminist literary theory, Gilbert and Gubar map the literary history of feminism’s second wave in Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination (W. W. Norton & Company). Together they trace the evolution of feminist literature from its stirrings in the midcentury – when Sylvia Plath, Betty Friedan, and Joan Didion found their voices and Diane di Prima, Lorraine Hansberry, and Audre Lorde discovered community in rebellion – to a resurgence in the new millennium with the writings of Alison Bechdel, Claudia Rankine, and N. K. Jemisin. Gilbert and Gubar offer lucid, compassionate, and piercing readings of major works, and examine the overlapping terrain of literature and politics in a comprehensive portrait of an expanding movement.

Victoria Mas has worked in film in the United States, where she lived for eight years, and is a graduate of Sorbonne University, where she studied contemporary literature. In The Mad Women’s Ball: A Novel (The Overlook Press), her debut book, it’s 1885, and Dr. Charcot holds all of Paris in thrall with his displays of hypnotism at the Salpetriere Asylum. His subjects: women who have been deemed mad and cast out from society. But the truth is much more complicated. These women – unwanted wives, wayward daughters, and girls born of adulterous relationships – are not sick, but inconvenient. When Geneviève, a senior nurse who has placed her faith in Charcot and science, meets Eugenie, the 19-year-old daughter of a bourgeois family that has locked her away in the asylum, things begin to change. Eugenie has a secret: She truly sees spirits and is determined to escape from the asylum. Publishers Weekly praised how “Mas elegantly blends feminist history and spiritualism, and poignantly demonstrates how the hospital is both prison and refuge for its residents, as Geneviève simultaneously grows disillusioned and empowered. Mas’ dark tale will have readers transfixed.”

A native of Spain, Virginia Feito was raised in Madrid and Paris, and studied English and drama at Queen Mary University of London. She worked as a copywriter until she quit to write her debut work of fiction, Mrs. March: A Novel (Liveright). The proper, dutiful wife of a successful novelist, Mrs. March is proud of her husband, as expected. Then a neighborhood shopkeeper suggests that her husband’s latest protagonist – a detestable character – is based on Mrs. March herself, and her world is suddenly shaken to its core. Part Hitchcockian psychological thriller, part social satire, the story follows her descent into paranoia. It begins within the pages of a book, after she finds a newspaper clipping about a missing woman in her husband’s office. But then, what about his recent “hunting trips” up north with his editor? Or the roaches that have suddenly started to appear, and the strange breathing noises? Soon Mrs. March’s obsession threatens everyone in her wake. Vogue praised the novel, saying it “portrays a rarefied world as hellish Grand Guignol. The pleasure of the book is in watching all that psychotic menace come out into the open, and in trying to figure how much of it is actually real.”