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...
Residence
Fleur Adcock
FA
, re-migrating as an adult from New Zealand to London, arrived there a week after the suicide of Sylvia Plath
.
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...
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
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.
164-5
She was deeply upset by this, and not consoled...
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...
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, pp. Weekend 25 - 31.
AS
published another volume of poetry, The Other House, written as she worked on her Sylvia Plath
biography.
Stevenson, Anne. The Other House. Oxford University Press.
jacket
Literary responses
Anne Sexton
British reviews were mostly scathing. Despite some respectful notices, the tendency was to see Sexton as a weaker version of the confessional aspects of Sylvia Plath
.
Middlebrook, Diane Wood. Anne Sexton: A Biography. Houghton Mifflin.
364
Literary responses
Stevie Smith
Novel on Yellow Paper was an immediate critical success. Appreciation expressed in reviews by Naomi Mitchison
and Rosamond Lehmann
laid the foundations for SS
's friendships with these and other writers.
Spalding, Frances. Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography. Faber and Faber.
125
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.
In her 2017 assessment Marina Warner
likens the text, as a testament to the horrors of psychosis and convulsive drug therapy that is split between visionary illumination and profound psychological distress, to such writing as...
Literary responses
Stevie Smith
This brought her work to a large and enthusiastic audience. Sylvia Plath
wrote to SS
declaring herself a fan. Several poems were printed in US papers and periodicals to prepare for the American edition in...
