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.
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
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...
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
.
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
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 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
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...
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...
