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.
About 2008 DL
felt close to breakdown. [L]ife was very hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn't see where there was to get to, she wrote later in the opening...
Intertextuality and Influence
Deborah Levy
This book has four sections, each titled from a reason for writing, Political Purpose, Historical Impulse, Sheer Egoism, and Aesthetic Enthusiasm. The first and last describe a period of near-breakdown that...
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.
She wrote steadily until she was twenty-one, then produced only about seven more poems until, in the early 1970s, she discovered both the women's movement and the...
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...
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...
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...
Textual Features
Seamus Heaney
These pieces cover elders and friends (Larkin
, Walcott
, Patrick Kavanagh
), poets of Eastern Europe where poetry performs the service of resistance to political oppression (as it might do in Northern Ireland...
Textual Features
Seamus Heaney
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...
The chapters are headed with quotations ranging eclectically through the international canon and counter-canon from Sophocles
and The Ramayana of Valmiki (an ancient Indian epic) to Spike Milligan
, via Charles Baudelaire
, T. S. Eliot
She does a fine job of evoking the poet's working-class childhood in the Pennine village of Mytholmroyd in Yorkshire: the valuing of thrift and hard work that came useful to Hughes in his maturity...
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.
