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.
RF
and her husband met Ted Hughes
and Sylvia Plath
in 1961, on the occasion of Hughes's winning the Hawthornden Prize, as Alan Sillitoe had done the previous year. The foursome first met, Fainlight recalled...
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...
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...
KKD
's concern about the treatment of women is further exemplified in her poem on the fetishization of Sylvia Plath
's suicide, Myths and Monsters. Dyson suggests that Plath's martyrdom occurred out of a...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Ketaki Kushari Dyson
The essays in this volume date from 1977-1985 and cover a wide range of topics, including an autobiographical essay on Dyson's path to becoming a poet, an essay on Jesus
, and a critical look...
Intertextuality and Influence
Carol Ann Duffy
The book was highly derivative. Though she had just discovered the poems of Pablo Neruda
, CAD
describes the contents of the volume as a mixture of Keats
and Sylvia Plath
and Dylan Thomas
and...
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.
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.
28
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...
Her brief essay on Stevie Smith
stresses originality, and also the omnipresence in Smith's poems of Death, as a presence not avoided but courted. Her even briefer piece on Sylvia Plath
notes the tendency of...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Gillian Clarke
Her volume opens with a poem, Baby Sitting, which voices a guilty unwillingness to respond to a child's demands; M. Wynn Thomas
thinks this a response to the angrier, rawer Morning Song which opens...
Literary responses
Leonora Carrington
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...
