Product Description
The first biography of Sylvia Plath to draw on unpublished journals and letters, Sylvia Plath provides a detailed, objective, and illuminating portrait of this talented and tortured woman who is widely recognized as one of America's foremost poets of the 20th century. 20 pages of photos. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Refreshing, Yet Informative
I am a recent follower in Sylvia Plath's work and I found that this biography read like a fiction novel, which I think that more biographical writers should do.It maintained this while being serious and formal about Sylvia's pain and her re-occuring issues with her husband.This book is highly recommended to anyone wanted to find out more about Sylvia's life from an unbiased point of view.

a good starting off point
This biography is a well-written, entertaining biography. It seems to be a good place to start your study of Plath. Trouble with the Hughes caused there to be much less quotes from Plath herself than we would have liked to have seen. And it seems a bit short to cover one of our most important poets in just under 250 pages. But still, it is a good book and a good place to begin.

Wagner-Martin a Solid Scholar
When she was simply Dr. Linda Wagner, the author was one of the shining stars of the faculty of Michigan State University Department of English. That's where I met her. When this biography was published, i was a doctoral candidate in English and American Literature at NYU. I wrote Dr. Wagner-Martin a congratulatory note and was oh-so pleasantly surprised that she not only responded, but she remembered me from my undergraduate days. Linda's (she was VERY informal) scholarship and academic acumen are world-class. One of her Michigan State colleagues, Dr. Clinton S. Burhans, Jr., once described her, admirinigly, as "a book factory." The Plath biography gives a wider audience a chance to appreciate the fine teacher, pain-staking scholar and tough-minded critic that Linda Wagner-Martin is. Highly-recommended for anyone seriously interested in American Literature, woman writers or the British-American literary milieu of the '50s and early '60s. (Incidentally, Ted Hughes WAS a creep..and not half the poet Sylvia was...despite recent [2003] attempts to rehabilitate his image. Linda is right on point here!)

Informative
I had the pleasure of taking an American Women Authors class taught by Linda Wagner-Martin at UNC Chapel Hill, and let me tell you, she really knows her stuff about Plath. She fascinated us with her tales of theprocess of writing this book. For a fresh perspective on the life and workof Sylvia Plath, this is a good one.

Clear, precise description of a haunted woman
So far, this is one of the clearest, and easiest to read biographies of one of the finest (and most intriguing) female poets of the 20th century.I recommend this book for anyone who wants to know more about Sylvia Plath,but doesn't feel like sorting through endless fluff and interpretations ofher work.This book simply describes the life of a tortured woman writer. Good job, great reading! ... Read more

Product Description

Sylvia Plath's poetry has generated tons of critical interest, yet there remains no full-length study of her fiction. In addition to her classic novelThe Bell Jar, Plath wrote dozens of short stories, only about half of which have been published. Luke Ferretter launches the first comprehensive study of Plath as a writer of fiction. He encompasses both published and unpublished material, tracing Plath's influences, style, politics, and place in the history of postmodern fiction. Plath was very much concerned with gender ideologies of the 1950s, and Ferretter reads Plath's work against this cultural context. Building on recent studies of her multigeneric work, Ferretter defines a clear and comprehensive place for Plath's fiction in her richly complex body of work.

Customer Reviews (1)

An excellent book through and through
Luke Ferretter's Sylvia Plath's Fiction: A Critical Study (University of Edinburgh Press) is a visionary, meticulous, and necessary work. It is a book both long overdue and ahead of its time. It is such a good book that there is no possible way I can see to write a review that could attempt to do it justice.

In Sylvia Plath's Fiction, Ferretter provides "close readings of Plath's texts...in their historical and cultural contexts, of the significant place that Plath's fiction plays in the vast, diverse and powerful body of work she has left us" (15).

In each of the five chapters, plus the introduction, Ferretter gives a very careful and clear reading; a realized look at this under-studied genre of Plath's. In the introduction, he gives a breakdown of Plath's stories by time period, as a way to identify the works he will discuss and to provide an authoritative chronology of their composition. This chronology is an immensely useful tool. For the uncollected or unpublished stories found in the various Plath archives, Ferretter gives conscientious summaries in lieu, unfortunately, of quoting directly.

The most fascinating chapter of the book for me is Chapter 2, which turns the inspection of Plath and Hughes's recto-verso conversations inwards and asks, "what light is shed on Plath's fiction by an examination of the poetry she was writing at the same time, and vice versa" (58). The chapter is divided by major time period such as Smith College, Cambridge, Boston and Yaddo, and The Bell Jar. In doing this, Ferretter can explore the ways in which gender relations or imagination and reality, for example, are treated simultaneously and in quite contrary manners. The benefit to this approach is that it highlights in some cases lesser examined poetry as well as obviously the stories, which have sadly been less considered. Although Plath wrote comparatively little poetry at the time she was writing The Bell Jar, as a big fan of the novel I was particularly interested to read this section. The immediate poems that come to mind are "In Plaster" and "Tulips", the latter being a commissioned poem Plath wrote for the Poetry at the Mermaid festival. Ferretter blissfully includes; however, poems that spane her entire 1961 output such as "The Hanging Man," "Wuthering Heights," and "The Babysitters."

The chapters on the Politics of Plath's Fiction (3), Gender and Society in The Bell Jar (4), and Gender and Society Plath's Short Stories (5) each achieve their arguments. Inspecting Plath's work through the multifaceted discourses of historical or cultural or political frameworks brings the reader closer to Plath and closer to the spark of the stories (or of the poems) creative inspiration. At least, the way in which this book is written it certainly does. It is as indispensable as reading the creative writing alongside of Plath's journals or letters or even through a consideration of the books she was reading concurrently.

The only criticism I can come up with is that many of the works discussed, though accurately summarized, will be unknown to some of its readers. This is certainly something Luke considered as he approached this text, in fact his awareness of the obscurity - for lack of a better word - of some of these works is evident throughout the text. However, this relative obscurity is not an insurmountable set-back. I wholeheartedly encourage - no demand - that Plath's readers with an interest in this Ferretter's book write to the archives in which these stories are housed and request photocopies. It will broaden your appreciation of Plath's talent and of dedication to her craft as well as your enjoyment of the book. You can find links to archival repositories holding Plath materials on my website.

Ferretter gives an expert and much needed inspection and evaluation of a highly under-evaluated area of Sylvia Plath's oeuvre. Read everything. Please. Read the footnotes, which are an inspiration, and read the back-of-the-jacket copy for astute comments by Langdon Hammer and Karen V. Kukil. This book is an achievement and a success and I feel sorry for anyone who skips it. ... Read more

Product Description
Here is the first book to bring long-overdue attention to Sylvia Plath's surprisingly accomplished visual art and to place that art in relation to her literary career. Plath trained as a studio artist before her sophomore year at Smith and her work in tempera and watercolor paintings, pastels, ink, crayon and pencil drawings, and other media reveals a talent that both complements and illuminates her genius as a writer.
Eye Rhymes brings together essays by six Plath scholars-including renowned authors Diane Middlebrook, Landgon Hammer and Christiana Britzolakis, book editors Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley, and Fan Jinghua-and contextualizes approximately sixty of Plath's visual works within her writing oeuvre, starting with juvenilia that reveal the extensive play between her two disciplines. Special attention is given to Plath's unpublished teen diaries and book reports containing drawings and early textual experiments, created years before her famous "I am I" diary notes of age seventeen, when critical examination of her writing usually begins. The book offers new critical approaches to the artist's multidimensional output, including writing that appropriates sophisticated visual and color effects years after painting and drawing became her hobby and writing her chosen profession. The essays gathered here also relate Plath's visual art interests to her early identity as a writer in Cambridge, her teen artwork and writing on war, mid-career "art poems" on the works of de Chirico, her representations of womanhood within mid-century commercial culture, and her visual aesthetics in poetry.
Filled with stunning reproductions of her art and fresh readings of many of her most important poems, Eye Rhymes offers readers a new way of understanding the full range of Plath's creative expression. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art
This book is both a revelation and a must-have for fans of Sylvia Plath's creativity. The illustrations in this book, beautiful art well-laid out,
show the breadth of Plath's creativity. I've been a long-time reader of Plath, and didn't know how much art-work she did in her life. The book is worth the price, and very well-done.

Sylvia Plath's art
Sylvia Plath is in the midst of a renaissance. Since the publication of her Unabridged Journals in 2000, hardly a week goes by without her name appearing in the news, and the publication of a succession of books continues to re-evaluate the poets status in the literary world. Although Plath proved to be one of the most contentious, interesting, and passionate writers of the 20th century, the 21st has been much kinder. The books about Plath published in the last seven years each attempt and succeed to change the way we read her works, examine archival material to enrich our readings, and call our attention to lesser-known poems, stories, and other creative products. This is most evident in Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Visual of the Art edited by Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley.

In addition to six wonderful essays by leading scholars, Eye Rhymes publishes for the first time more than 70 art works by Plath. The earliest dates from when she was just seven years old, and the latest is her Cold War collage, perhaps the most familiar and talked about piece she created. The book marries the artwork and Plath's creative writing, illustrating a one-to-one translation between the two types of creativity; what Susan Gubar in her Afterword calls the "sister arts" of Sylvia Plath.

The essays draw heavily off the Sylvia Plath Materials held at the Lilly Library, Indiana University at Bloomington. It is evident, however, that The Sylvia Plath Collection at the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College was used extensively as well. Plath's artwork informs and inspires each essayist; and it is Plath's writing, either contemporary to the artwork or her later, more mature writing, that allows for a clear, steady progression of Plath's talent. Often times, the essays show a kind of conversation taking place between ideas and themes present in Plath's art that resurface either immediately or much later in her poetry and prose. In a way then , Plath is talking back to herself, in addition to talking back to Ted Hughes by writing on the verso his compositions. Eye Rhymes, then, "follows the entire trajectory of Plath's creative genius, from her first signs of artistry on the seashores of New England, to the final culmination of her craft as a poet, essayist, and novelist..." (1). What the essays make perfectly clear that from early childhood straight through to her death, Plath continually worked creatively and that her adolescent and young adult interest in art translates and manifests itself in her best writing. The aim of the book is to "shed new light on Sylvia Plath as artist, critic, and intellectual, and the creative processes she employed throughout her life" (3).

As I state in my own biography of Plath, her pre-Smith years (1932-1950) are overlooked most often by scholars and researchers. Her published journals and letters both select her Freshman year at college as their starting point. Her Collected Poems start even later, in 1956. However, it is the formative, pre-college years that gave birth to this poet and, in the end, are responsible for The Bell Jar and the Ariel poems for which she is most famous. All the tools and values Plath needed to succeed as a writer came from this period, and it is a shame that it is so frequently neglected. No longer, as any reader of Eye Rhymes will develop a new appreciation for Plath the precocious child, Plath the driven adolescent, and Plath the talented artist. Eye Rhymes is a monumental contribution to Plath scholarship. ... Read more

Product Description
Containing everything that celebrated poet Sylvia Plath wrote after 1956, this is one of the most comprehensive collections of her work. Edited, annotated, and with an introduction by Ted Hughes.Amazon.com Review
Sylvia Plath died in 1963, and even now her outsize personathreatens to bury her poetry--the numerous biographies and studiesoften drawing the reader toward anecdote and away from the work. It'sa relief to turn to the poems themselves and once more be jolted bytheir strange beauty, hard-wrought originality, and acetyleneanger. "It is a heart, / This holocaust I walk in, / O goldenchild the world will kill and eat." While the juvenilia and poemswritten before 1960 that Ted Hughes has included here prefigurePlath's later obsessions, they also enable us to witness her turn fromthesaurus-heavy verse to stripped-down art as they gather powerthrough raw simplicity. "The blood jet is poetry. / There is nostopping it," she declares in "Kindness." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (30)

An ethical question
The poems Sylvia Plath is best known for are the poems of her greatest torment. They are powerful and violent. They speak out of desperation with deep emotion. At the same time they have the brilliance of language and innovativeness of much of the best poetry. I have difficulty with them for two reasons. The first is perhaps entirely my fault. I do not feel I understand them very well. But of course the way to understanding them more is greater investment in time and rereading. But I am reluctant to go too deep into this violent emotional world. The second has to do with an 'ethical question' regarding the placing of first value on works which excel in self- dramatization and anger against others.

"Her dead body wears the smile of accomplishment..."
Sylvia Plath - The Collected Poems has to be the best book of poetry in the world. I love Sylvia Plath, she was a genius. Her poetry moves me, everything she has ever written is gold. The first poem I ever read by Plath was Metaphors, "I've eaten a bag of green apples, boarded the train there's no getting off." Something about that line just struck a cord with me, from that moment on I was determined to read all her poems. Another poems I love include: Soliloquy of the Solipsist, I am Vertical, The Other, The Rival, You're, The Rabbit Catcher, Lady Lazaurus, Stillborn, For A Fatherless Son, Leaving Early, Morning Song, Cut, A Birthday Present, Fever 103, Gigolo, Daddy, and The Disquieting Muses. She writes about her father a lot, he died when she was nine and his death left her with depression for the rest of her life, from The Colossus, "Counting the red stars and those of plum-color. The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue. My hours are married to shadow." The Jailer is a poem I just adore, "My sleeping capsule, my red and blue zeppelin drops me from a terrible altitude." The poem, Poem for a Birthday- Witch Burning is gorgeous and frightening real, "I inhabit the wax image of myself, a doll's body. Sickness begins here: I am a dartboard for witches. Only the devil can eat the devil out." Plath left a legacy of timeless poems, short stories, and a novel, The Bell Jar. I have enjoyed reading The Collected Poems and so will you, Enjoy!

Treasure Discovered!
I originally bought this book seeking one special poem. What I have got now is a the key to the richest of treasure chests!

Collection Tracks the Course of a Genius's Rise and Fall
Anyone who has not discovered Plath's poetry-- distinctly superior to her prose-- would be greatly served to seek out a slim volume called "Crossing the Water."This haunting collection features most of her greatest poems from what I think to be her most creative years: 1957-1959.If these don't grab you, then give up on her altogether.However, the Collected Poems are the inevitable place to continue since they include her early promising works, as well as those dark pithy gems that characterize her bitterly twisted slide into the furthest reaches of her capacity for cynicism and despair.

A superb collection.

Most poems fall short
I first came across Sylvia Plath in an anthology of modern poetry.Her poems "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" blew me away.The former may well be, in my opinion, the best poem ever written by a woman, and one of the five best written by anyone in the last two centuries.Buying this book, I expected more of the same.Unfortunately, I found most of her early work to be dissapointingly typical.The reason Plath is so controversial is that her greatness is linked inextricably to her darkness.Before the latter manifested during her divorce and subsequent depression, there just wasn't that much to her.In other words, much of her early poetry is that of a reasonably intelligent woman- entertaining, even a little intriguing, but lacking the fury of "Lady Lazarus", the darkness of "A Birthday Present", or the fatalistic beauty of "Ariel".And while there are some glimmers of the genius that is to come (The Colossus, I Am Vertical), they aren't many.My advice to any prospective reader is to save some time and money and pick up her collection "Ariel", which contains 90% of her essential work. ... Read more

Product Description
Giving Up is Jillian Becker’s intimate account of her brief but extraordinary time with Sylvia Plath during the winter of 1963, the last months of the poet’s life.Abandoned by Ted Hughes, Sylvia found companionship and care in the home of Becker and her husband, who helped care for the estranged couple’s two small children while Sylvia tried to rest. In clear-eyed recollections unclouded by the intervening decades, Becker describes the events of Sylvia’s final days and suicide: her physical and emotional state, her grief over Hughes’s infidelity, her mysterious meeting with an unknown companion the night before her suicide, and the harsh aftermath of her funeral.Alongside this tragic conclusion is a beautifully rendered portrait of a friendship between two very different women.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (19)

An Honest Book
After reading some of thenegative reviews, I feel I must voice my own (favorable) opinion.

The criticisms mentioned most: how did the author know Plath? (suspecting ulterior motives = $$$ and last grab at fame) why did she write this book forty years later? she barely knew her anyway! what's with the large section on the question of anti-Semitism?

While reading the book, I had a skeptic's eyebrow constantly raised and I completely agree that these criticisms came to my mind many times.

But the more I read, the more difficult it was to find fault with the author, and eventually, my inner cynic let go.

Once I did, I found this memoir to be a very intimate, touching, and honest portrait of Plath. So why should you read a memoir written by a friend who knew her so briefly?

I can say with complete sincerity that many of my best friendships bloomed rapidly. I have had friendships last only a few months (typically terminated by moves) and these friends know me--who I was during that time--better than anyone.

And my goodness! Had she known Plath for only four days, I think her credentials are sufficient, for those days were the last of Plath's life. Morbid? Perhaps. But for those of us interested in Plath's life, though, what greater statement has she made? Becker is a lovely writer and an observant friend.

We must remember that as much as we wish it, "Giving Up" is Becker's memoir, not Plath's. And she is defensive about, well, the things that many of us have criticized: who is she to have been the last of Plath's friends to see her alive? Could she have helped? That question will be an essential part of any survivor's story. Even forty years later, she needs to remind herself as well as us that she could not have saved her friend's life.

A large part of her story, too, was her Jewishness. That was clearly an important aspect of THEIR friendship, the lens through which Becker saw and understood both Plath and Hughes. I found this section to be surprisingly valuable and if I had to choose between the anti-Semitism stuff and a story of how the friends met, I would go with the former. It proved to be a much more important factor in their relationship than, say, the name of whoever held the party where Becker and Plath were introduced.

Finally, why would Becker write, publish, and earn money from this story? And why forty years later? I believe her when she says that she wants to write it down before she forgets. I sincerely doubt that this is her last grab at fame and fortune--why on Earth would she wait FORTY years, until she was, what, in her seventies? to attempt such a ploy?

A book like this requires a certain amount of trust. Trust that Becker finds her story worthwhile and thinks that others would find it worthwhile as well. We must quiet that cynic. Of course, this was simply MY reading, but I hope that others may (unlike I) begin with a more generous outlook and if the writing rings false, make judgments after the book is closed.

Morbid curiosity and curious motives...
This story, though interesting and yes, haunting is largely a self-serving product from an admitted poet wannabe, whom, I feel, hoped that by being associated with Sylvia Plath, some of Plath's genius would rub off on her.They were only "friends" for a very short time, and I sensed jealousy in her words regarding Plath's writing, although admittedly she did take care of her when Plath had no one else and reached out in desperation. For that she should be admired, for depression is an ugly THING that will suck the life out of the sufferer and all those around them.I just question her motives in her relationship with Plath (how did they meet?How did they bond? etc.), and in writing this book.I hear "LOOK AT ME!" loud and clear.The whole chapter regarding Hughes'perceived anti-semitism?? I understand that the author is Jewish, but how is that dissection and her offense to it relevant to Plath's story?Plath wasn't an anti-semite.THAT most of all was self-serving.("I HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY! LISTEN TO ME!") It's the author's story and experience, and I get it but not much of the information contained in this very small book about a very short and who knows how close relationship is information that is not covered in the plethora of Plath biographies and such.It fulfills the morbid curiosity and I admit that is why I read it, but Sylvia Plath was SO much more than the way she died, and her death was largely all this author knew of her. I don't feel that Becker had anything of consequence to say that other biographers haven't already said on the subject.This, the world could have done without, in my opinion.

Plath's late-life friend attempts to set the record straight about the circumstances surrounding her death.
In Jillian Becker's brief (thirty-minute read) book about her friendship with the famous poet Sylvia Plath, she recounts her final days in a straightforward, brutally honest manner. Her motivation in publishing her side of the story is to tell her side of the story and set the record straight, since information she has provided to multiple sources on the topic has been largely ignored, and sometimes, suppressed. The tiny volume is a mere 73 pages short, containing only six chapters: The Last Days [those that Plath and children spent in the company of the author and her family immediately preceding her death], Remembered Conversations [things they talked about regarding poetry and Plath's ex-husband, poet Ted Hughes, who abandoned his family for another woman], The Funeral [the event and post-funeral dinner conversation], Afterward [Plath's post-death fame and information Becker provided to biographers], Slightly Filthy [Becker debunks certain portions of Hughes's poem Dreamers regarding Assia's ancestry and discusses his and Plath's poetry as relates to Judaism, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust], and Myth [Plath's feelings on feminism].

About the various players in the life (and death) of Sylvia Plath, Becker has plenty to say. Of the woman Hughes left Plath for, Assia Wevill (who also committed suicide, and murdered her daughter who was fathered by Hughes), Becker writes that she was (p 11) "vain and shallow." Hughes gets the royal treatment. He was, she claims, (p 23) "[s]elf-absorbed" and (p 72) "faithless and brutal as a Nazi." After the post-funeral meal he proclaimed about Plath, (p 44), `"Everybody hated her,"' of suicide, (p 46) "It was in her, you see..." Lastly, of his contention that (p 64) "his poetry is curative" Becker opines, (p 64, 65) "Hughes's self-exoneration is not merely pretentious twaddle, it is blasphemy..."

Jillian Becker's memoir on "the last days of Sylvia Plath" is a telling tribute of a true friend to a woman whose actions forever affected her. Great companion read: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

More unrewarding analysis about Sylvia Plath
One of the most fascinating aspects of Plath's literary and personal mythology is the need for so many others to give voice and interpretation to a highly educated, highly vocal woman who muted herself.Becker joins the ranks of numerous scholars and critics by putting in her analysis as a friend and admirer of Sylvia.Still, I fail to see how Becker delivered much of worth.

Do we really need this book? No.Did I get it because of my morbid fascination with the lost last days that Hughes relegated to assumption because he burned her final diary entries? Yes.Am I satisfied? By no means.

I agree with several other reviewers who stated this could have better had it been relegated to essay or article format. The book is quite short, especially on the final days of Sylvia Plath's life.It is skimmed over so quickly, with little recollection of actual events that the reader is left with the haunting mood Plath left Becker with on that final night.After these several inadequate pages, Becker explains her thoughts on the funeral (something I had never read about).And then we are taken through a long redundant explanation of how no one could help Sylvia, and Hughes should assume his responsibility for what happened.

Becker brings in a couple of Hughes and Plath's poems to aid her in explaining how she came to some of her conclusions about their relationship.And then Becker delves into which of the two was an anti-Semite(?!).She ends the book with how ironic it was that the feminist movement appropriated Plath as the eternal victim of male aggression and oppression, when in fact Becker thought of her as happy in her feminine roles (she does contradict this point in the text).One interesting line was how Sylvia did not like her name pronounced to rhyme with "math," it should have been pronounced "Plaath."

Maybe I expected too much from such a slim volume.But I think Becker mislead her readers as well.I recommend this only for fans of Sylvia Plath that must read it all--regardless of how good/bad, positive/negative a book may be.Read Sylvia Plath's poetry and prose for a truly rewarding read, her own words serve her best.

A sympathetic friend tells of Sylvia Plath's last days
Becker helped Plath during the last days of her life. She provided a place to stay and helped with the care of her children. She tells the story of Plath's last few days from the point- of- view of a sympathetic friend. She is critical of Ted Hughes who she blames for the abandonment of Plath. According to Becker Plath was totally broken by this abandonment and could not get herself together.
This is a very sad tale. ... Read more

Product Description

A new edition of Sylvia Plath's Pulitzer Prize-winning Collected Poems, edited and with an introduction by Ted Hughes

Customer Reviews (3)

bestever
I wanted to hone it till I became saintly and thin and essential as the blade of these pages

A bit disappointed...
I was eagerly expecting this book.
The poetry of Plath does not need any more praises, for her name and fame already bring with themselves all the admiration from the critics and the public alike, amassed in time with sustained ardour.
But what did negatively surprised me for a book of collected poems from such a renowned author was the overall quality of the volume's presentation. The paper severely lacks in quality. It's of course darker than the usual good quality paper and it is a bit coarse. I would've probably suggested a laminated book cover, rather than the plain and frailpaperback, which can easily get stained (and you couldn't clean it as efficiently as a laminated one), if not a hardback.
My opinion always was that the presentation of a book should at least try to come close to the art of an author's creation. But this certainly isn't the case here. I'm disappointed.
I give with all one's heart 5 stars to the poetry of Sylvia Plath, and also to the introduction and notes, and 1 star to the quality of the book. If it would be possible to Amazon to introduce two kind of item rates: one for the writer's efficacy as a literary craftsman and another one for the book's presentation.

Valuable for the Plath-Addict
I thought I owned all the poems she had because I had "Crossing the Water", "The Colossus", and "Ariel". But this book has a large number of unpublished poems, and poems that were published but not selected for those collections. In addition, the footnotes and commentary by her husband Ted Hughes are invaluable and fascinating. A must for Plath scholars and fans. ... Read more

Product Description
This engrossing début novel depicts Sylvia Plath’s feverish artistic process in the bitter aftermath of her failed marriage to Ted Hughes—the few excruciating yet astoundingly productive weeks in which she wrote Ariel, her defining last collection of poems.

In December 1962, shortly before her suicide, Plath moved with her two children to London from the Hughes’s home in Devon. Focusing on the weeks after their arrival, but weaving back through the years of Plath’s marriage, Kate Moses imagines the poet juggling the demands of motherhood and muse, shielding her life from her own mother, and by turns cherishing and demonizing her relationship with Ted. Richly imagined yet meticulously faithful to the actual events of Plath’s life, Wintering is a remarkable portrait of the moments of bravery and exhilaration that Plath found among the isolation and terror of her depression ... Read more

Customer Reviews (32)

A deep, touching look into Plath's last couple of years
Wintering was written with each chapter subject corresponding to the original order Sylvia Plath had in mind for her last work, Ariel.I found Moses' idea to link her novel about Plath with Ariel fascinating...such a genius idea.As others have mentioned, it definitely works best to read the poems in Ariel before and after reading the corresponding chapter in Wintering.That makes for quite a thought-provoking experience as a reader.

There are some portions in this book that moved me to tears, particularly those with Freida and Nicholas Hughes as children.Such tender visions I had of Sylvia with her children during those scenes.But, make no mistake about it - Moses does not spare us the grim realities of Plath's life.The struggles she went through as a newly single mother trying to make a new life for herself and her children are painfully described.

I only wish somehow I could have more insight into Plath's last month.Unfortunately Ted Hughes destroyed her journal entries from that time period.Gone forever.It does leave me with a feeling of being left hanging, but nonetheless I'm grateful for what insights we've been able to glean from her other works, including her poems, journals, and letters home to her mother.

Kate Moses writes with fluidity and can capture a scene in one's imagination profoundly well.I only wish she was less wordy with her sentences, but hey, it gave me an opportunity to expand my vocabulary (I looked up a slew of words in the dictionary while reading). I definitely give Wintering a thumbs up!

Purple Prose
The reason why I brought this book was the first page. I was amazed at how beautiful the prose was. I've owned the book for over a year now, however, and have yet to finish it. The hook was the downfall. I defend flowery writing--to an extent. I love it in books on CERTAIN passages. But this book just never stops. Moreover, I got bored of hearing Silvia whine about her husband while cooking and cleaning and changing diapers. Yes she was a mother, and yes her husband cheated on her, but she was more interesting and did more than that, I'm sure.

Still, I do like the book. I prefer to slowly nibble one chapter at a time (and god willing I'll actually finish it that way). I reach for its rich language when I'm feeling uninspired, and it is pretty heart-wrenching. Its a good try, and Im not at all sorry I bought it. I recommend it to people who also enjoy rich language.

Interesting
"Wintering" by Kate Moses is a novelization of the very last days of the life of Sylvia Plath.I have read several biographies of Plath, and two novelizations, "Wintering" and "Sylvia and Ted" by Emma Tennant.Nobody is impartial about the life and death of Sylvia Plath:her varied biographers, people who knew Plath, readers and reviewers on Amazon.Many reviewers felt Moses' book was too emotional and presented in a florid, overly detailed writing style.The same criticism appeared in the reviews of "Sylvia and Ted".I found the writing style totally appropriate to the subject matter:Plath's life was filled with frenzy and drama.I would compare the writing style of both novels to "Blonde", a novelization of the life of Marilyn Monroe.Women of the 50s and 60s strove to have it all, success and recognition, love and marriage.Both Sylvia and Marilyn worked very hard to be good enough, yet no matter how much they achieved, they were always thwarted, their success snatched away and their fragile psyches battered over and over.In Sylvia's case, there were always lesser interlopers who claimed the prize she felt should be hers:her baby brother pushing her from the family spotlight, a situation made worse by the death of her father (by dying, he insured she could never please him), lesser academic rivals making it into a cherished writers' workshop when she did not, her husband Ted's strangely posessive sister, and snotty and snobbish Dido Merwyn, sitting in judgement on Sylvia, an insipid girl student at Smith, a sixteen year old babysitter, and finally and most punishingly, Assia Wevill.In "Wintering", Moses totally nailed the image of Assia eyeing Sylvia's life, accomplishments, and possessions and deciding to take them for herself.We can feel Sylvia's disgust and despair:how could Ted, who knew her soul, prefer the shallow and grasping Assia?But by spewing forth a litter of new, powerful and emotionally laden poems, then dramatically and mysteriously ending her own life, Sylvia did in a way finally manage to win.Sylvia's enemies were left with her leftovers:Ted and Assia were cursed (and weak enough) to remain in her cast-off homes, spending the money earned by her talent and labor, raising her children.

Pretty Good Had it's boring parts though..
I liked this book overall.. thought it was a good book to read about one of my favorite poets Sylvia Plath. Towards the last half of the book I did lose a bit of interest.. and just wanted the book to be over with.. But it was good.. if your a fan of Sylvia Plath or just interested and want to know more about her then give this book a try.

Justin

a disappointment
I had very high expectations for this book, but felt let down in many ways.The first thing that irked me was the writing style, pseudo-Plathian prose which, while dispersed with Plath's imagery from Ariel, came off as dry and dull.In the way that metaphors wake up Plath's The Bell Jar, Moses's misuse of Plath's words put her novel to sleep.Her dialogue seems well below the level of language that Plath, a prodigy and college educated woman, would use in daily conversation, and often seems more feigned and melodramatic than any person would use.

The novel had its good points as well, ingeniously set up with chapters that paralleled the poems of Plath's version of Ariel.Moses depicted Hughes as a neutral to sympathetic character which was a nice break away from the "killer of Plath" image that accompanies many biographies of the Poetess.I most appreciated that the novel ended in December of 1962, two months before Plath's death and, hence, did not touch on Plath's justification of the event.

I would recommend this novel only to someone who loves Plath and needs to read everything about her.Otherwise a biography (like Middlebrook's Her Husband) would relay more information about Plath and Hughes, skipping unrealistic dialogue and failing alterations of Plath's imagery.
... Read more

Product Description
From the moment it was first published in The New Yorker, this brilliant work of literary criticism aroused great attention. Janet Malcolm brings her shrewd intelligence to bear on the legend of Sylvia Plath and the wildly productive industry of Plath biographies. Features a new Afterword by Malcolm.Amazon.com Review
Sylvia Plath committed suicide in February 1963, and since then her poetry, fiction, and, increasingly, her life have maintained enormous power over readers' (particularly female readers') imaginations. Biographies continue to appear with regularity, despite the strong hold the Plath estate has on her work. But because of that hold, each biographer has been forced to accommodate the living (Ted Hughes, who was separated from Plath at the time of her death, and his larger-than-life sister, Olwyn, long the executrix), often at the expense of the dead. In 1989, Anne Stevenson's peculiar hybrid, Bitter Fame,was published, complete with an appendix full of devastating memoirs. It was not your average biography. When Janet Malcolm was first sent the book, she was less drawn to it by the Plath legend than by the fact that she had known Stevenson in the '50s, but she soon became captivated by the book's defeatist subtext. The dead woman's voice and writings seemed to overwhelm Stevenson's tentative narrative; and if that wasn't enough, there was also the none-too-angelic choir of those who had known Plath. "These too, said, 'Don't listen to Anne Stevenson. She didn't know Sylvia. I knew Sylvia. Let me tell you about her. Read my correspondence with her. Read my memoir.'"

Bitter Fame was soon garnering some powerfully bad notices, especially that of A. Alvarez in the New York Review of Books. Alvarez, the author of one of the most influential pieces on Plath, in his study of suicide, The Savage God, had some special, personal cards to deal, as have so many others Plath left behind. Because Malcolm's great theme is treachery--that of the interviewer, the journalist, the teller of just about any tale--the Plath mess seemed a perfect fit, and she decided to become a player, too. In 1991, Malcolm was having lunch with Olwyn Hughes in North London, 28 years to the day on which the poet died.

This is only one of the coincidences in The Silent Woman, a postmodern biography par excellence, which is less about the drama of Plath's life and still controversial death than about their continuing effect on the living. For Malcolm, all cards are wild, each one revealing more complexity, human cravenness, and, above all, brilliantly playful aperçus about human agency and writing's deceptions. I look forward to the dictionary of quotations that foregrounds the elegant "The pleasure of hearing ill of the dead is not a negligible one, but it pales before the pleasure of hearing ill of the living." And then there's, "Memory is notoriously unreliable; when it is intertwined with ill will, it may be monstrously unreliable. The 'good' biographer is supposed to be able to discriminate among the testimonies of witnesses and have his antennae out for tendentious distortions, misrememberings, and outright lies." It's clear that Malcolm doesn't see herself as a "good" biographer--she openly declares her allegiance, but is more than capable of changing it and of showing her cards. Or is she? In the end, The Silent Woman is a stunning inquiry into the possibility of ever really knowing anything save that "the game continues." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (25)

Remarkable Book
This is a remarkable book, a blend of numerous genres: biography, memoir, journalism, criticism, psychological analysis, deconstruction of other biographers and memoirists and their work, discussion of postmodernism, and more. Malcolm has an extraordinary intelligence and imagination--both expressed in her metaphors, many of them extended beyond belief. I particularly liked her metaphors for and about Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes's sister: "Cerberus to the Plath estate," Anne Stevenson's unsuccessful commanding of "Olwyn back into the lamp," Anne's obliviously walking into "Olwyn's web." (Anne wrote what Malcolm says is a good biography of Plath that Olwyn insisted on editing and correcting as the price of permission to quote.) Malcolm has brilliant things to say about memory and memoirs, criticism, biography, the impossibility of fair-mindedness and truth, writing in general, the language of face and body that can't be captured on recordings, and footnotes. What I don't understand, although Malcolm addresses the question, is why any of the people she interviewed and wrote about gave her permission to quote them. Even the people whose sides she takes emerge scarred and bleeding from her descriptions. Surely her reputation for this proclivity preceded her with at least some of the characters in the book. On the other hand, the noted critic Harold Bloom has remarked on her "wonderful exuberance" and has stated that her books "transcend what they appear to be: superb reportage."

Of biography Malcolm says that it "is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out into full view of the world. The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house . . . . The voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity." And, "there is no length he [the biographer] will not go to, and the more his book reflects his industry the more the reader believes that he is having an elevating literary experience, rather than simply listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people's mail." Similarly, "The reader's amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole."

She uses one of her extended metaphors to discuss the issues of writer's block and the elusiveness of truth, which I had not realized were related: "At the end of Borges's story 'The Aleph,' the narrator goes to the cellar of a house, where he has the experience of encountering everything in the world. He at once sees all places from all angles . . . . Writer's block derives from the mad ambition to enter the cellar; the fluent writer is content to stay in the close attic of partial expression, to say what is 'running through his mind,' and to accept that it may not--cannot--be wholly true." Later, Malcolm says, "Truth is, in its nature, multiple and contradictory, part of the flux of history, untrappable in language." She contrasts nonfiction and fiction in an interesting way: "In a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth of what happened. The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports what is going on in his imagination." (Of course that leaves unanswered the real question of whether that imagination captures the truth.) Finally, Malcolm relates a visit she made to the incredibly littered, filthy house of an artist and author who had written recollections about Plath. She saw the place as "a kind of monstrous allegory of truth" in its "unmediated actuality, in all its multiplicity, randomness, inconsistency, redundancy, authenticity."

In relation to the cluttered house, she writes further, "the narratives called biographies pale and shrink in the face of the disorderly actuality that is life. . . . Each person who sits down to write faces not a blank page but his own vastly overfilled mind. The problem is to clear out most of what is in it, . . . to make a space where a few ideas and images and feelings may be so arranged that a reader will want to linger awhile among them, rather than to flee. . . . But this task of housecleaning (of narrating) is not merely arduous; it is dangerous. There is the danger of throwing the wrong things out and keeping the wrong things in."

Malcolm is also insightful on post-structuralism, a viewpoint that she at least partly shares, calling it "a theory of criticism whose highest values are uncertainty, anxiety, and ambiguity." Writing about a poststructuralist writer and professor of English literature who wrote _The Haunting of Sylvia Plath_, Malcolm says that "In accordance with post-structuralist theory," Jacqueline "Rose argues for suspension of all certainty about what happened, and thus of judgment and blame." Finally, she refers to "the post-structuralist vision of writing as a kind of dream, which no one (including the dreamer-writer) ever gets to the bottom of."

Of her conversation with Rose, Malcolm says, "I render it with the help of a tape recording, which preserved the words that passed between Rose and me but did not catch any of the language of face and body by which we all speak to one another and sometimes say what we dare not put into words." This from a woman who had won a lawsuit brought against one of her books about Freudianism by a psychoanalyst; she won by playing a tape recording of her interview with him.

Recommended even for people who are not specifically interested in Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes because of the book's insights into the nature of truth, memoirs,fiction, and biography.

A Fascinating Biography of Biography
THE SILENT WOMAN: SYLVIA PLATH AND TED HUGHES by Janet Malcolm is a biography through the lens of what's wrong with biography. It's fascinating to Plath fans and afficionados (me) and those who want to examine language, text and form and the barriers between whatever truth is and the outcomes of communication (me again).

Malcolm is explicit in her premise: A biography had been written of Plath by Malcolm's University of Michigan cohort, Anne Stevenson (Bitter Fame), that had been controversial. Plath loyalists fulminated against Stevenson's pro-Hughes bias, and the Hughes family denounced it because they said that Stevenson had not cooperated enough. Malcolm, who looked up to the slightly older Stevenson at U of M, who is also a poet of some standing, follows the process of the Plath biography, as well as other works on the famous poet and the machinations/efforts of her former husband and Plath's literary estate executor, Hughes's sister, Olwyn. Malcolm interviews many of the participants, including Olwyn, but not Ted Hughes, and works not to find a "right" or "wrong" but to understand the issues with biography that can create the problems of trying to portray another's life. In the process, she exhibits more on the life of Hughes and Plath that fascinates those who are interested in such things. She couldn't have chosen a better example/subject to use for this dissection, because their lives are compelling, and the drama around how those lives have been portrayed by others -- including the impression management on the Hughes side, which was no small matter -- seem never ending.

Malcolm writes, "In a work of nonfiction, we almost never know the truth of what happened" (p 154). Malcolm faces this issue squarely and doesn't try to make a definitive statement about what did or didn't happen between Hughes and Plath, Plath and others, the Hughes estate and her various biographers. Instead she narrates her investigation, her ownbiases, and the flaws and quandaries that exist at every point along the way. Stevenson's troubles, the reader comes to see, may just be a strong form of the problems and doubts all biographers could -- and should? -- experience.

In the end, one gets the sense that the Hughes family worked perhaps too hard to control the impression of Ted after the suicide of his up-and-coming poet wife in the early 1960s (though who could blame him after he was villified and blamed for her suicide by those who took public "sides" in their marital discord, and he stated that he was also quite worried about his children's perceptions of their mother, family and selves if there was a free-for-all regarding Plath's literary and personal legacy). Ted and Olwyn were negative even toward literary scholars who interpreted Plath's poetry in ways objectionable to them and made working with the estate for very necessary quoting rights quite difficult. As Malcolm depicts Stevenson after her book's publication and the ensuing hue and cry, her break with the Hughes family and Plath estate and her reaction to same as wilted and beaten down. The book seems as if it were a tragedy in her professional life from which she must recover because of the interpersonal drama between the author and Olwyn Hughes.

Interestingly, the book also has a strong subtheme that examines the pressures, pains and stress of accomplishment by literary women born in the 40s who came of age in the 60s. (There's a brief discussion of Stevenson's marriages, and the impact her literary ambitions had on her family life.) Stevenson and Malcolm are around the same age as Plath, and this personal investment in the times and age is also fascinating from a political-gender point of view.

If I had any complaint about the work, which was an expansion of a lengthy New Yorker article that was printed in the 90s, it is that it ends too suddenly. After all the activity and investigation, I wanted Malcolm to make sense of it all for me, but the book just seems to cut off after Malcolm meets a man integral to the Plath suicide narrative, her downstairs neighbor, who may have been the last to see her alive.

Malcolm is a conversational and somewhat "confessional" feeling writer who is not afraid to be explict about her personal investment and lens that engages the reader and makes her feel an insider in this investigation of femininity, biography, rhetoric and one of the lightning rods of gender relations in the 20th century. I recommend it on any one of these levels.

Exciting bio research
Janet Malcolm is really unique. Her book is never a conventional biography of Plath, but a study of the things that were not written by Hugues, an exam of every other book on Sylvia Plath and a brilliant anaylisis of the literary biographic genre and literary biographies readers. Besides, her style is so concise and it has an inner rythm and you feel as if you were reading a thriller. And there is something really Davoine or Lacanian in her approach, because she shows the inner sides, the difficulties, the doubts and the reverse of everything she touches. You can see Ted Hugues hidding himself and divided between the two masters he has to serve. And in the same time, Sylvia Plath is there, in every page, the Silent Woman. Terrific.

Silence Can be Deadly
After reading everything about everything on Plath, it was refreshing to finally come across something unique and different such as,"The Silent Woman."In fact, one needs to read this book before they read anything else about Plath--- so they are informed and do not waste their time on the many false, unauthorized trash out there. One could say that "The Silent Woman" is a kind of rich almanac into Plath's secret, exquisite, dark world--and the people who loved and despised her. It is not a biography--but more of a journey to find truth.

I loved getting to know more about Olwlyn Hughes (typically English), and of course Ted Hughes.And "The Silent Woman" helps the reader to understand why they are as protective as they are about Plath. (I would not have taken a liking to Olwlyn and can understand why Plath disliked her.)

"The main problem with S.P. biographers is they they fail...They can caricature and remake S.P. in the image of their foolish fantasies, and get away with it--they assume, in their brainless way, that it's perfectly O.K. to give me the same treatment--apparently forgetting that I'm still here" --TED HUGHES

Come on people--have some common sense, some decency.How would you feel if your family displayed all their dirty laudryoutside for all the world to see? And Plath has lots of dirty laudry--but don't we all? Suicide-adultry-mental illness-the list could go on forever.

I like Janet Malcom--her writing style, her references to Mr.Frued, and her surprising insights.I like the way she created something new from all of the hundreds of the same.After all, Plath was much too complex to be a carbon copy of something else.

Attention all Plath lovers---Read this book before you pick up anything else about Plath. The only exception would be "The Unbridged Journals of Sylvia Plath"-(superbly stunning) and directly from the horse's mouth. Now, this gem could be read before reading "The Silent Woman" beforehand!

Despite Itself
Despite itself, an excellent book on Sylvia Plath. Who knows the truth about the enigmatic, "silent woman" of the book's title? No one, perhaps, not even that woman herself, who was mixed up about the kind of poetry she wanted to write and about her destiny, even her citizenship was fluid. Although Janet Malcolm wrote this book to prick holes in biographies of Plath that seek to canonize her, she really sinks her teeth into Anne Stevenson's repellent and semi-authorized biography "Bitter Fame," which on its publication was widely seen as the Hughes' camo corrective to Plath hagiography. Malcolm finds out exactly what information Olwyn Hughes was willing to share with Anne Stevenson, and which slant was verboten, and the whole shameful affair, while not the superb intellectual condemnation of biography that Malcolm thinks it is, is stimulating on nearly every page. And in the process Malcolm tracks down and interviews some important people in the Hughes/Plath saga, and even makes room for Plath's most important critic, the UK theorist Jacqueline Rose. All in all, it's a mixed bag, and Malcolm is pretty repellent, but oddly enough it's exciting from start to finish. ... Read more

Product Description
The first-ever full-length biography of Assia Wevill, the lover of Ted Hughes and rival of Sylvia Plath.

My true wife and the best friend I ever had," wrote Ted Hughes after AssiaWevill's 1969 suicide. Long seen as the woman who lured Hughes away from Sylvia Plath, Wevill has remained a mysterious figure. Now, for the first time Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev tell the story of Wevill's remarkable life and the seven years she spent with Hughes before killing herself, and their daughter, in a manner that inevitably recalled Plath's suicide six years earlier.

Drawing on previously unavailable papers, including Wevill's diaries and intimate correspondence with Hughes, Koren and Negev offer a gripping portrayal of the uneasy life the couple shared under Plath's long shadow. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (30)

More Than a Footnote
Assia Wevill was much more than a footnote in the lives of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, and she is at last given her fair due in this impeccably researched and well written biography. As the authors assert in the book's final chapter, Wevill to date has been marginalized or even completely absent from the biographical landscape of both Hughes and Plath, so I am grateful for the undertaking to correct this gross omission.In addition to the partnership role she played in Hughes' life, Wevill was a respected translator, editor, and advertising professional.Her relationship with Hughes was inarguably doomed by the death of Plath, by Hughes' demons and her own ultimately tragic ones, but regardless of circumstance and the subject's (roundly addressed) psychological makeup, she is presented here as a complex, multifaceted woman with her own rich history, one worthy of being told.For that readers should be most thankful.

Interesting and thorough
This book was well written and well researched - the author obtained a lot of personal information from her close friends and family. I found it easy to read. It was nice to learn about Assia's life before Ted Hughes/Sylvia Plath. I'm not sure if I like Assia, but she's a very interesting subject. At times she's completely unsympathetic, but other times you can't help but feel sorry for her and her situation. I would recommend it.

The Second Romantic Tragedy In Ted Hughes' Life
An excellent biography that, especially when paired with any number of Plath biographies, paints a very unflattering portrait of Ted Hughes. However, despite Assia's infamy stemming from her relationship with Hughes during and after his breakup with Plath, the book manages to paint a well rounded picture of Assia as more than just The Other Woman. Assia Wevill's life was fascinating in it's own right, and the authors of this biography have done a great job. It's a must for any Plath fan as well as anyone who enjoys a well written and thoughtful biography.

Unable to sympathize
For anyone who is interested in literary history, and specifically the drama between Plath and Hughes, this was a story that needed to be told. Nevertheless, the authors go overboard trying to get readers to sympathize with Assia Wevill. Whether it's because they share Wevill's Israeli heritage or are mutual friends with her friend, poet Yehuda Amichai, I'm not sure. But their bias is inherent.

Another reviewer said it best: the authors maintain that Wevill was known to lie and embellish quite frequently, and yet they present information from her journals as fact. Despite their best efforts, Wevill comes across as selfish, self-absorbed, directionless, and wholly unlikeable. A quote by one of her acquaintances seems to sum it up nicely: she was born with a poet's temperament, but without the adequate skills or ambitions to express it. Instead, Wevill is portrayed as a deeply flawed, tragic figure willing to hitch her wagon to any rising star.

Most disturbing was the authors' attempts to justify Wevill's murder of her daughter. They claim that it was purely altruistic, but one wonders why, rather than infanticide, Wevill didn't send the poor little girl to live with her aunt in Canada. It seems more in keeping with Assia's character that she wanted to "one-up" Plath and punish Hughes by taking both herself AND her 4 year old daughter away.

A Good, Sad, and Scary Read
The title says it all.I'm not sure whether the insight lies in the women Ted Hughes chose or the way he treated them; he was not a carefree person, either.This is almost a textbook study, in a way, of Borderline Personality Disorder. ... Read more

Product Description
" . . . a young woman who . . . rose from the dead to become, in ten driven years, the best - the most exciting and influential, the most ruthlessly original poet of her generation." -- John Updike

Of the many American poets who reached her zenith in the last few decades, perhaps none looms so large as the legendary Sylvia Plath. Consummately crafted, Plath's poetry is stormy but luminous, sharp but poignant. This unique, compelling and intriguing recording has been heralded as "a significant tribute to and record of the lyric art that Sylvia Plath left to the literary heritage of America." (Booklist)

Contents:

Customer Reviews (6)

Sylvia Plath Reads
What more can be said?She reads emphatically, and there can be no better translation to her work, than by her reading it, herself.Each time i hear any of these poems, my heart goes out to her and i FEEL what she reads deep in my soul.For anyone who resonates w/her writing and even anyone who is remotely "into" Sylvia Plath, i cannot recommend this audiotape higher.The only so-called negative that i can think of, is that there aren't more readings on the tape.

Wonderful to Hear The Real Plath Reading Her Work
The only reasons I gave this audiobook 4 stars is that it lacks any introduction to each poem - does not even give a title.I know Plath generally announced something about her poetry when she read for BBC.

It would have been helpful to include a small booklet of the poems read simiar to Anne Sexton's Audiobook.

I wish more poems had been included.The actual audiobook is pretty sparse.

I was delighted to hear her mature beyond her years voice reading one poem from the original "Ariel" -- about the death of her neighbor Perce, entitled "Berek-Plage".

Her voice is powerful, full of anger and anguish that builds in such intensity it is though she is in the room with you.

A Voice from the Grave: Hearing Sylvia Plath
A rare treasure. Hearing Sylvia Plath read her own material is a necessity for any Plath fan. Some fine moments throughout. Would like to have heard selections from "Ariel". Still, a rewarding purchase.

Sylvia Plath Reads--Early Work
"Sylvia Plath Reads" is an asset to any Plath fan or scholar's collection. However, keep in mind that this 50 minute cassette tape focuses primarily on her early work, and not the infamous Ariel poems which epitomize Plath's legacy and that made her name. Taken in this light, these poems are luminous, haunting, and executed with her characteristic immaculate craftsmanship. At times, they can be quite thesaurus-driven and artificed. Several excellent poems represented include the following: "Berck-plage" (the only Ariel poem on the recording), "Mushrooms," "November Graveyard," and "The Stones" (from "Poem for a Birthday").

A special experience...
...to actually hear Sylvia Plath read her own work.The poems here are wonderful(the selections are taken from radio broadcasts, I think)and not surprisingly, the author's voice adds much more to their enjoyment.And itis an interesting voice: deep, with a slightly stilted,"unplaceable" accent, and a throaty emotional quality.I onlywish there was more-more poems, and perhaps even one of her interviews thatare sometimes excerpted in documentaries. Nevertheless, a must for Plathreaders. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Very Interesting Study of Plath
I bought a used version of this book because I wasn't sure if I would like it or not. I was pleasantly surprised and impressed. I have not read tons of Plath criticism, but I felt this was the first I have read to really articulate what makes her poetry so compelling for me. Chapter Two on Orality and Writing I thought was just deadly accurate about Plath's work. I kept thinking, "Exactly! Wonderful!" Rose takes a few psychoanalytic ideas from Kristeva and Freud and makes them really work--this chapter should be a model for how to use psychoanalytic theory in interpreting literature in a productive and succinct way. I would have liked to see this chapter expanded--the ideas in it can be a little dense and quick (like Plath) and I would have liked to see Rose expand this to an analysis of more poems. I felt truly enlightened after reading this. The fourth chapter on Plath, feminism and fantasy is also excellent: Rose gave me so much to think about. She really opened up a way to read Plath again and she negotiated the question of Plath's relation to feminism very well. (To me) her ideas were unique and original.
My only criticism is that throughout I would have liked to see Rose analyze more poems. This book in fact struck me as a blueprint or outline for what should be a longer, more extensive analysis of the work. But overall, it will leave you inspired to do your own readings of Plath. I feel grateful for the provocative and helpful insights of this book.

Harrowing
This is a fascinating account of the controversal life and death of one of America and England's most wondered-about poets. Gives many new details and fresh insights. Highly recommended! ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (2)

review
This is pretty thin stuff.in "Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence:A Case of Wrongful Conviction", author John Osborne launches a polemic against what he terms a 'late millenial obsession with the biographical'.His purpose is to counter the criticisms of Larkin based on assumptions about larkin's life.in introducing his topic, he refers in passing to the harm done to some poets by the obsession with their personal lives - Sexton, Plath to name a couple.in doing so, he throws off some insights into the text of her peotry which lifts it from the category of 'confessional' into what he says is truly great poetry, with subtle, complex intertextual references to other earlier sources - Coleridge, longfellow,Arthur miller.Even Cliff Richards' 50's hit song - Living Doll - , mimicked in her poem - 'a living doll, everywhere you look.
it can sew, it can cook,
it can talk, talk, talk.

more meat about Plath in these one and a half pages of intro to another book about another poet,than the thin gruel served upin this compilation.

The Unraveling Archive
Anita Helle's The Unraveling Archive: essays on Sylvia Plath is a very welcome and long-awaited addition to Plath scholarship.The eleven literary critical essays examine Plath's work and life and are connected through each author's experience using Plath's archives.

The books two sections divide the essays into the following themes: The Plath Archive and Culture and the Politics of Memory.Plath's archives are divided between the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington, and the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College.The essays in this section concern themselves with "newly published, underutilized, and underrepresented material." (8)Tracy Brain, Robin Peel, Kathleen Connors, and Kate Moses examine various aspects of the Plath archive.Brain discusses Plath's Ariel manuscripts and the recent publication of Ariel: The restored edition.Peel continues to draw out Plath's interest in politics, following his 2002 monograph Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War politics in his survey of Plath's political education. Kathleen Connors, mastermind behind the 2002 exhibition Eye Rhymes and co-editor of a forthcoming book under the same title, discusses the riches of Plath's visual works, a skill which was highly developed at an early age.Moses draws on the audio recordings of Plath's voice in a variety of poetry readings and interviews conducted from 1958 through early 1963.

The essays in the second part, Culture and the Politics of Memory, "reflects the opening up of critical approaches to Plath and also the explosion of the canon."These essays explore "works that have received less critical attention" but also drawn on the "heightened awareness of the contexts and settings that have mediated our understanding of Plath's multiple identities."(8)Essays by Sandra Gilbert, Ann Keniston, Janet Badia, Anita Helle, Marsha Bryant, Lynda K. Bundtzen, and Diane Middlebrook each present valuable insight and opinion on Plath's work and help to continue a re-evaluation of critical reception.

The publication of this book, on the radar for about a year, it is well-received like a delayed plane finally reaching its destination.Two enthusiastic thumbs up; my only regret is that I don't have more thumbs... ... Read more

Product Description
Critics debate Plath's value as a writer: detractors call her overly sentimental, while admirers argue that she engendered whole movements of women's poetry. The works studied in this volume include The Bell Jar, A Fine White Flying Myth, and But I Have a Self to Recover.

This title, Sylvia Plath, part of Chelsea House Publishers’ Modern Critical Views series, examines the major works of Sylvia Plath through full-length critical essays by expert literary critics. In addition, this title features a short biography on Sylvia Plath, a chronology of the author’s life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A lucid, compelling, and precise biography
Peter Steinberg's new biography charts Sylvia Plath's tumultous career in moving prose. His narrative demonstrates precision and is informed by the recent landmarks in Plath scholarship. His own passion for Plath's writing and travels to Plath sites lend a significant dimension to his descriptions of the places and events that inspired some of Plath's most famous poems. I think this book will be a welcome addition to high school reading lists and will inspire students to explore Plath's poetry.

New biography with new facts
I am the author of this book, for which Linda Wagner-Marting graciouslessly wrote the Foreword.This new biography of Plath, the first to appear since the early 1990s, presents Plath the poet and Plath the person as inseparable. It's about her writing life.

The mini-review Amazon has is for the Harold Bloom collection of essays published in the late 1980s. I certainly hope that they fix this in order to prevent confusion and/or slower sales.

Cheers! ... Read more

Product Description
Describes various beds that are much more interesting than beds for sleeping, such as a jet-propelled bed, snack bed, pocket-size bed, and bounceable bed. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

please, bring this book back!
Embark on a gentle, fantastic trip into a magical world that lies between reality and dream. Your child's imagination (and your own) will drift into sleep with images of acrobats, submarines, elephant beds, and so much more!

That this book should be out of print is a complete mystery to me, not enough violence in it, I imagine.As for the used price above, I can just imagine snuggling in bed with my child and an antique book... Books like this are meant to be read again and again, not placed in a gilded cage on a pedestal.

Not just an ordinary book
"Not just a white little, tucked in tight little, nighty night little, turn out the light little, Bed."

And this is not just an ordinary book. I came accross it one day and decided to give it a go,having read other Plath works. This book is incredible, te utterchildishness of it, every time I think of it, it brings a smile to my face.This book is a must-read.

My son's most favorite book.
My son and I read this book for years at bed-time - It was our absolutle favorite. Somehow we have lost the book and I have been searching for another copy for ages.Can the DC reviewer provide me with the name of theBritish publisher that is going to re-release this book - or any otherdetails that might lead me to a copy?I would be very appreciative!

The Bed Book will be Available in September!
After years of searching for acopy (new or used) of Plath's "The Bed Book", which I used to read to my son when he was a toddler, I discovered that a publisher in the U.K. is going to re-release the book inSeptember, 1999. I hope Amazon.com will make it available. . . this is asmashingly creative book, with page after page of beautiful watercolorillustrations.

Takes children through the magic that all beds can be...
Discovered along a shelf of an old library in Germany this book became a favorite from day one. Forget the Sylvia Plath learned in freshman English and tight biography; the bed book sings. It encompasses all the joys of imagination when the bed in darkness bore you away to magic kingdoms and jungles dark. With a whimsy and rhyme it carries the reader through the shapes and wonders of each bed. "In an elephant bed you can go where you please. You can pick bananas right out of the trees. An elephant bed is where kings ride. It's cool as a pool in the shade inside." Who hasn't wished to snuggle again into the beds of childhood deep and soft, warm with play; no deadlines or faxes to looming near ... Read more

Product Description
The brief life and meteoric career of Sylvia Plath have been the subject of fascination since her suicide in 1963 at age thirty. This concise, well-researched biography recounts the facts of her troubled life based on the latest updated research. Biographer Connie Ann Kirk has consulted the Plath archives at Smith College and the University of Indiana Bloomington, as well as Plath's unabridged journals published in 2000. She has also interviewed a Plath contemporary who knew her.

What emerges is a balanced portrait that takes a neutral stance between the divided factions in the blame game surrounding her suicide. Kirk describes the outrage directed against Plath's estranged husband, Ted Hughes. Many accused him, not only of causing her death because of his philandering, but also of heavy-handed editing of her posthumous work. But Kirk notes that others have attributed her tragic end mainly to deep-seated psychological factors over which she and those close to her had little control: her lifelong battle with depression; her difficult relationship with her parents, especially her father; and the pressures of balancing a literary career with the roles of wife and mother.

This excellent, very readable biography includes photographs, a timeline, a family tree, a list of books in Sylvia Plath's personal library, and a bibliography of works by and about her. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Second Serving: Sylvia Plath by Connie Ann Kirk
Connie Ann Kirk's 2004, Sylvia Plath: A Biography, was recently reissued by Prometheus Books. Unlike it's first appearance, this title is available at bookstores, making it one of the few introductory biographies available to a more commercial market (the 2004 Greenwood biography series edition being primarily a 'library' book).

On the back of the book, in big letters is "The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it." Those who know "Kindness" quite well will notice the addition of "and", which is not in the poem. This is sloppy. The blurb on the back of the book claims that by the time Plath died, she left behind a "popular novel, The Bell Jar", but we know this wasn't the case.

There is an over reliance on other biographies, and throughout the work, Plath and Hughes and the other players are referred to by their first names, as "Sylvia," "Ted," etc. Addressing Plath and the others in the familiar actually made it more difficult to read. The tone throughout was off, and I kept thinking I was reading something by Marcia Brown Stern, Jillian Becker or Elizabeth Sigmund, i.e. people that knew Plath and can get away with addressing the subject as such. There are also contradictions between the chronology in the front of the book and in the text. Etc. etc.

While the main facts are there, several errors from the first edition were not corrected in this new edition, frustrating this reviewer. Rather than list everything as I did with the errors contained in Bowman and Hurdle, I'll spare you the bitchy details of what's wrong with this book. When an author such as Kirk, a serial biographer, approaches a life like Sylvia Plath's, it is almost excusable to make mistakes. But, it is also quite inexcusable. The biographer must be painstakingly dedicated to getting the facts of their subject correct. Especially in an introductory work where their words may be responsible for intriguing and education a future fan or scholar. While this isn't the greatest introduction to Plath (and there are betters one's out there; and yes, as you might imagine, naturally my bias leans towards my own little biography of Plath), it is better than some of the fuller length treatments of Plath's life. The book itself is a handsome production.

This "independent scholar" needed an editor...
Connie Ann Kirk is an author I'd like to have a beer with.If we were hoisting our ales at The Anchor in Cambridge, I'd pick up the check--in a sense, I already have.It's a great sorrow to eagerly track down a copy of this book, only to find it one of the most earnest, enthusiastic, and yet most deeply flawed attempts yet to write about Sylvia Plath.Kirk does present more information about Plath's childhood and her parents' background than other biographers have, although the only really essential point is a passing mention of the fact that Otto Plath's mother, sister, and niece all suffered from depression.The reader also learns, for example, that Aurelia Schober and Otto Plath took Aurelia's mother with them as chaperone on their winter break from teaching when they drove from Massachusetts to Nevada to obtain Otto's divorce, to marry, and for "a short trip around Nevada" afterwards.But we don't learn whether the nuptial trio spent six weeks in residence there, which was the standard at the time for a Nevada divorce.That's the kind of detail that a sharp-eyed editor might have caught.

Kirk provides an appendix listing the contents of SP's "library... based on evidence from her journals, letters, and other writing."This "library" includes the usual English-major volumes, along with The Bobbsey Twins series and Calling All Girls magazine--not surprising, from what we know about Plath's lifelong fascination with writing for a broad readership--but omits works by such authors as W.S. Merwin, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Richard Murphy, Alan Sillitoe, and Ruth Fainlight, all of whom Plath knew personally, admired their work, and corresponded with.Other strange omissions are "Catcher in the Rye" and "Franny and Zooey." Plath salutes J.D. Salinger several times in her journals, and lent "Catcher" to Ted Hughes during their courtship.It is hard to believe she didn't have that novel in mind while drafting "The Bell Jar," since many reviewers of her only published novel have made that comparison as well.Kirk appends a long and interesting list of "secondary and related sources," many of which, it appears, she may not have used as primary sources.In addition to its clumsy writing style, this biography's other greatest weakness is the presence of so many factual errors.Judging by the few footnotes, Kirk may have reliedheavily on the flawed biographies written by Ronald Hayman and Paul Alexander, whose most startling inaccuracies were corrected by other authors and journalists well before Kirk first published this title in 2004.For example, Kirk perpetuates Hayman's error of giving the birth year of Assia Wevill's daughter by Ted Hughes as 1967, not 1965, though she often cites Diane Wood Middlebrook's "Her Husband," a book generally found fair-minded and accurate on the details of the Plath-Hughes marriage, its demise, and its aftermath.

Kirk is highly selective about what material to include.This brief book refers often to "feminists" who criticized Ted Hughes' management of Plath's posthumous publications and fame, without naming a single one of them.She also includes the names of Plath's fellow Mademoiselle guest editors, which makes it embarrassingly easy to pick out the modelsfor "Doreen" and even "Betsy" in "The Bell Jar."And during the crucial, frigid weekend before Plath killed herself, she and her children were houseguests at the centrally heated home of her deeply concerned friends, Jillian and Gerry Becker.When Jillian went back to Plath's chilly flat to pick up a list, supplied by Plath, of necessary items, the list included no books.Kirk quotes minutely, but incorrectly, the titles that Plath was reading shortly before her suicide, but according to Jillian Becker's published memoir, Plath did not ask her to bring them along. That's the kind of Big Whoops unfortunately common to Kirk's work.Another one: Kirk insists that of all of the monies that poured into Plath's bank account upon her separation from Hughes, from Hughes himself, Mrs. Plath, Plath's mentor Olive Higgins Prouty, and the Plath family, the donation from Plath's Aunt Dot went specifically to buy the cooker in which Plath gassed herself.How do we know?Not one other author, or Aunt Dot herself, for that matter, has said so.This is the sort of assumption-stretching visible when Kirk states thatPlath "accosted [A. Alvarez] with the desire to have an affair" on the Christmas Eve before her death.The actual encounter was much more subtle, as Alvarez himself wrote that he was not able to "accept responsibilities [he] didn't want, and couldn't, in [his] own depression, have coped with."(The reference comes from Alvarez's memoir in "The Savage God," published after Plath's death and not cited by Kirk.)

This author clearly loves books, loves her subjects, and it would be a joy for read her work without marking it up like a sadistic teaching assistant.But as a self-proclaimed "independent scholar," she lacks the merciless peer review and editing that shape a boulder into a gem. ... Read more

Product Description
Susan Van Dyne's reading of twenty-five of Sylvia Plath's Ariel poems considers three contexts: Plath's journal entries from 1957 to 1959 (especially as they reveal her conflicts over what it meant to be a middle-class wife and mother and an aspiring writer in 1950s America); the interpretive strategies of feminist theory; and Plath's multiple revisions of the poems. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Great Study of Plath
I've read everything, and I mean everything, on Plath, and this is a wonderful study. Sympathetic, very complex without being difficult, clear, and well-written. I learned a lot. I like how she stayed focused on the poems. She extracts a few basic central themes, and really makes her points. It's a wonderfully empathetic feminist study.

Revising Life: A Short Review
This critical study is a concise and intelligent look at the cultural
influences that shaped both the personal life,and artistic life of
Sylvia Plath.Van Dyne does a good job of using Plath's poetry to
show the reader how Plath was conflicted by the limited viewpoint of society towards women in the forties and fifties. Van Dyne shows
how Plath fought those stereotypes of women to find her own self and
voice.It's a good book,one of the better critical studies of Plath. ... Read more

Product Description
Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life examines the way Plath made herself into a writer. Close analysis of Plath's reading and apprenticeship writing both in fiction and poetry sheds considerable light on Plath's work in the late 1960s. In this updated edition there will be discussion of the aftermath of Plath's death, including the publication of her Collected Poems--edited by Ted Hughes--which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982. Biographies of Plath will be examined along with the publication of Hughes's Birthday Letters. A chronology maps out key events and publications both in Plath's lifetime and posthumously.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Writing and Reading Life
Having read so much drivel about Plath this year, I decided to turn back the clock a bit...

Linda Wagner Martin's Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (Macmillan Press, 1999; 2nd. ed. rev. and expanded, 2003) is a gem. What struck me in 1999 when it first came out was the fact that it discussed unpublished materials, be they letters, poems, prose, or other. Discouraged by the number of mediocre books I've read recently about Plath (particularly poems about Plath), I thought I'd give a critical work a read, just to reestablish a connection with good writing about Plath. A good critic can convince the reader that their approach to the subject is the right way, despite any amount of knowledge one may possess about the said subject. Wagner-Martin does this. In the Preface, she states that Plath's life was "genuinely a literary life. There was no other aim for Sylvia Plath..." It is with this in mind that Wagner-Martin writes one of the best critical books on Plath.

The themes in Plath's poetry and prose that Wagner-Martin examines include "Plath's Hospital Writing", "Plath's Poems about Women", as well as "Recalling the Bell Jar" and "Lifting the Bell Jar", amongst others. Each chapter is clearly written and easy to read, full of wonderful, original analysis and shows the constant connections and a continual narrative, in Plath's body of work. Wagner-Martin draws much of her information and analysis from her own experience in working on Plath, as well as the working papers for her 1987 biography, and includes interview transcriptions and correspondence with Plath's friends and family members. It shows the value of good archival research, looking at drafts of poems and their deleted or otherwise unused lines and unfinished ideas.

Wagner-Martin writes, "We care about Sylvia Plath because of her poems, and her progress toward her last poems is one of modern literature's most exciting narratives." A finer way to express why we read Plath and why her poetry and prose matters cannot be stated. By examing Plath's earlier writing, and considering some of the writers she was reading, Wagner-Martin's claim that "Sylvia Plath trained all her life for her art" is easily supported.

The second, revised and expanded edition, published in 2003, includes a thirteenth chapter that looks particularly at Birthday Letters. Wagner-Martin explains that the first edition was already in production when Birthday Letters was published, making it impossible to add commentary about it at that time. While given just cursory criticism and examining just a few poems, the chapter takes a little bit away from the books focus: Plath's literary life. This is unintentional, especially given Wagner-Martin's criticism of Hughes having published the collection in a fashion that she feels usurps "the authority of Plath's narrative" and "literally [takes] the words out of Plath's mouth."

Wagner-Martin closes the second edition with what I consider to be a challenge to Plath's Estate and her readers. She says that, as a major poet, Plath "deserves to be swept along in a steady stream of appreciative criticism, scholarly accuracy and newly loyal readers." I couldn't agree more. Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life is a valuable contribution to Plath scholarship by an ardent scholar and admirer of the poet.

A concise view of Plath in her time
This book is an excellent look at what Plath wrote, her beginnings as a writer, the climates that she worked in and how her relations with her mother and her husband helped to shape her writing.While I would haveliked to see more of how Plath's favorite authors influenced her, there isenough new material (letter and journal excerpts, as well as the author'sobservations) to make it a worthwhile addition to the ever-growing pile ofbooks on the legendary Sylvia Plath.A good study for beginners andscholars alike. ... Read more