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.
ET
published what one critic described as a kind of soap-opera biography or literary thriller about Sylvia Plath
, Ted Hughes
, and Assia Wevill
, The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted.
Gilbert, Sandra M. “Dead poet’s society”. Women’s Review of Books, Vol.
xx
, No. 6, pp. 1-4.
1, 3
Textual Production
Carol Ann Duffy
CAD
edited a selection of Sylvia Plath
's poetry for Faber
in 2012, and in 2013 she edited A Laureate's Choice: 101 Poems for Children, with illustrations by Emily Gravett
.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
In addition to these collaborative works, AS
has published an anthology of her own favourite texts, those she sees as essential to her development as a writer. Published twice under different titles—The Reader (2006)...
Textual Features
Gillian Allnutt
In the poemWhy NotGA
ponders the relationship between women's writing, the ambiguity of language, and the seduction of suicide. The speaker (presumably GA
) imaginatively places herself in the subject-position of Virginia Woolf
Textual Features
Leonora Carrington
LC
's text adapts the story of Judith and Holofernes and includes several more characters whose names also come from the Bible version. In addition to the widow Judith, it features her father, Issachar (in...
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...
Textual Features
Anne Stevenson
Many of these poems are occasional. Journal Entry: Ward's Island, inscribed to Lauris Edmond
, recalls minus-eighteen-degree weather on the last day of a poetry festival in Toronto in February 1989. (AS
describes...
Textual Features
Michèle Roberts
The contents of this volume span a range of genres and moods. poems about places or natural objects observe with precision; love poems are often ambivalent: won't you make my blood / jump? won't you...
Textual Features
Jennifer Dawson
The title (not the one under which it was first submitted) strikingly anticipates that of Sylvia Plath
's The Bell Jar, 1963, with its image of an invisible barrier separating the protagonist from the...
Textual Features
Seamus Heaney
These pieces cover elders and friends (Larkin
, Walcott
, Patrick Kavanagh
), poets of Eastern Europe where poetry performs the service of resistance to political oppression (as it might do in Northern Ireland...
Textual Features
Seamus Heaney
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...
Textual Features
Anne Sexton
AS
took the title for this volume from the novel Herzog, by Saul Bellow
, whose writing she deeply admired: Live or die, but don't poison everything.
Middlebrook, Diane Wood. Anne Sexton: A Biography. Houghton Mifflin.
162
Its contents included Sylvia
's Death...
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...
