In this paper, we propose a novel transfer learning framework, named generalized subspace distribution adaptation (GSDA), to tackle the challenging cross-corpus speech emotion recognition problem. First, we learn a common low-dimensional feature subspace by utilizing a generalized subspace learning method. Second, we develop a novel distance metric to reduce the divergence between the source and target corpora, which can efficiently explore the similarity and dissimilarity information in the process of knowledge transfer. Third, to demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, we apply GSDA to the traditional subspace learning algorithms. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments by using the low-level features and deep features on three popular emotional databases, i.e., Berlin, IEMOCAP, and CVE. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework can achieve better performance than several state-of-the-art transfer learning approaches.