Sylvia Plath

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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.
Black-and-white photo portrait of Sylvia Plath, looking directly at the camera and seated in front of bookshelves.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Occupation Eva Figes
EF had a long stint as co-editor of this series, which includes works on Margaret Atwood , Jane Austen , Elizabeth Bowen , Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Frances Burney , Willa Cather , Colette ,...
politics Margaret Drabble
She also remembered the rise of feminism: the books by Doris Lessing , Sylvia Plath , Nell Dunn , and Edna O'Brienthat would irreversibly affect women's destiny, and the pioneering of feminist journalism by Mary Stott .
Drabble, Margaret. “1960s”. The Guardian, 26 May 2007, pp. Weekend 25 - 31.
28
Publishing Ruth Fainlight
RF wrote an essay about her friends Jane Bowles and Sylvia Plath , which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement and was reprinted in Crossroads, the journal of the American Poetry Society . Another...
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...
Publishing Zoë Fairbairns
Between her first and her second novel, ZF wrote a feminist updating of the myth of Iphigenia, only to have it rejected by Macmillan .
Fairbairns, Zoë et al., editors. More Tales I Tell My Mother. Journeyman, 1987.
164-5
She was deeply upset by this, and not consoled...
Reception Julia Ward Howe
Elaine Showalter 's biography, The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe, 2016, claimed that Howe possessed the subversive intellect of an Emily Dickinson , the political and philosophical interests of an Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Reception Ruth Fainlight
RF has drawn appreciative comment from fellow poets and writers like Helen Dunmore , A. S. Byatt , and Elaine Feinstein (who has written that in a time when every poet is wooed by the...
Residence Fleur Adcock
FA , re-migrating as an adult from New Zealand to London, arrived there a week after the suicide of Sylvia Plath .
Vincent, Sally. “Final touch”. Guardian Unlimited, 29 July 2000.
Adcock, Fleur. Poems: 1960-2000. Bloodaxe Books, 2000.
final page
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.
qtd. in
Middlebrook, Diane Wood. Anne Sexton: A Biography. Houghton Mifflin, 1991.
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...
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 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 Gillian Allnutt
In the The Talking PrincessGA grapples with the challenges of finding and asserting the female voice: I woke / and begged one question of my adoring prince. / Would he accord my dream...
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...
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

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