Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Sylvia Plath
-
Standard Name: Plath, Sylvia
Birth Name: Sylvia Plath
Married Name: Sylvia Hughes
SP
was primarily a poet, and most famously a confessional poet, although she also wrote a novel, a radio play, short stories and a book for children. She is best known for the poems she wrote in the last eighteen months that she lived. Her life story, complete with her suicide at the age of thirty, tends to overshadow her literary achievement, although critics of recent decades have made strides towards preserving her literary contribution and promoting its value.
The Rattle Bag, arranged not by date, or theme, or even alphabetically by author, but alphabetically by title, aims at and achieves a happy and fertile randomness, gathering chips of brilliance from all times...
Publishing
Seamus Heaney
For the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sylvia Plath
's death, SH
wrote a critical response to her poetry, The indefatigable hoof-taps (titled from Plath's poem Words), which was published this day in the TLS...
Literary responses
Felicia Hemans
FH
remained continuously in print throughout the Victorian period, but her critical reputation and popularity waned before its close and died with modernism. She lingered on in popular memory as the author of popular recitation...
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
She wrote steadily until she was twenty-one, then produced only about seven more poems until, in the early 1970s, she discovered both the women's movement and the...
Textual Features
Judith Kazantzis
The errant unicorn that she struggles to ride is the poetic impulse, and she says she entertains incompatible wishes: to ride it hard towards social goals, but also not to be labelled or compelled along...
Health
Deborah Levy
About 2008 DL
felt close to breakdown. [L]ife was very hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn't see where there was to get to, she wrote later in the opening...
Intertextuality and Influence
Deborah Levy
This book has four sections, each titled from a reason for writing, Political Purpose, Historical Impulse, Sheer Egoism, and Aesthetic Enthusiasm. The first and last describe a period of near-breakdown that...
Intertextuality and Influence
Edna St Vincent Millay
Thomas Hardy
(as reported by Elinor Wylie
) is believed to have said her poems were one of the only two great things in the United States, the other being the skyscraper.
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House.
xiii, 290
To...
Education
Betty Miller
At this point Betty entered St Paul's School for Girls
and then (having fallen ill) had a convalescent year at a Catholic
boarding school cum sanatorium at Berck-Plage near Boulogne.
Miller, Sarah, and Betty Miller. “Introduction”. On the Side of the Angels, Virago, p. vii - xviii.
viii
Sylvia Plath
later...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Oakley
The authors use as epigraph a passage from Sylvia Plath
's Three Women: a Poem for Three Voices.
Oakley, Ann et al. Miscarriage. Fontana.
9
They then begin with some shocking statistics. Nobody knows what proportion miscarriages bear to live...
Textual Production
Tillie Olsen
TO
's dazzling performance as a Communist speaker was the first phase of a career that led towards her later years as a star literary lecturer. As a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute
she spoke...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ruth Padel
Having loved and immersed herself in poetry all her life, RP
took a gamble and changed her self-definition from university lecturer in classics to professional writer and poet. Fifteen years later, writing of her own...
Textual Features
Alexander Pope
The play is remarkable among its other fun for a minor characater, Phoebe Clinket, an unhinged woman poet. She was wrongly identified in Edward Parker
's Key as Anne Finch
, a mistake which has...
