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.
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...
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
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
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...
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
Wendy Cope
Reviewer Andrew O'Hagan
, however, applies a withering pen to WC
in a tirade about a general style of anthology which is, he says, frivolous or aimed at the lifestyle or selfhelp markets. His complaint...
Literary responses
Laura Riding
This broadcast brought a notable poetic response. Sylvia Plath
wrote a poem, Little Fugue, which she annotated, on listening to Laura Riding.
Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books.
400
Robert Nye
soon afterwards sent a copy of his first publication...
Literary responses
Anne Stevenson
Germaine Greer
praises her in Slip-Shod Sibyls for expressing consciousness of herself as a woman poet rather than the woman poet, for looking forward to the forging of a new language in which women would...
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...
