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.
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
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
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
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...
Textual Production
Anne Stevenson
During her first marriage AS
tried to write a novel, but found (like Sylvia Plath
's heroine in The Bell Jar) that she had nothing to say.
Stevenson, Anne. Between the Iceberg and the Ship. University of Michigan Press.
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...
AS
retains her belief in poetry's need and capacity to reach out to elusive reality, to the ahuman, wordless world.
Stevenson, Anne. Between the Iceberg and the Ship. University of Michigan Press.
173
Stevenson, Anne. Between the Iceberg and the Ship. University of Michigan Press.
170-1
She keeps an Ongoing Anthology, a loose-leaf folder with copies of...
Textual Production
Emma Tennant
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 Production
Anne Stevenson
AS
's life of Sylvia Plath
, Bitter Fame, was published by Viking
in London and Houghton Mifflin
in Boston; even before it appeared it was immensely controversial.
Stevenson, Anne. Between the Iceberg and the Ship. University of Michigan Press.
29-33
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anne Stevenson
This book attempts to tell the story of Plath
's marital sitation without taking sides, and not to let the knowledge of her later fame colour the telling of her story in its own day.
