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.
Many of these poems are occasional. Journal Entry: Ward's Island, inscribed to Lauris Edmond
, recalls minus-eighteen-degree weather on the last day of a poetry festival in Toronto in February 1989. (AS
describes...
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...
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
Michèle Roberts
The contents of this volume span a range of genres and moods. poems about places or natural objects observe with precision; love poems are often ambivalent: won't you make my blood / jump? won't you...
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...
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
Textual Production
Tillie Olsen
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...
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.
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.
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Michelene Wandor
Gardens of Eden begins by quoting Genesis and the Alphabet of Ben Sira. In the latter (source for the story of Lilith as Adam's first wife) Lilith claims equality with Adam.
