The Journals of Sylvia Plath

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She worries about future conflicts between her role as writer and wife, wondering if she can preserve her identity as a writer while scrambling eggs for a man. By her sophomore year at Smith College, she sets her goal: a symbiotic relationship between husband and wife in which each can work to realize potential. She expresses the desire to deliver babies, both human and poetic; she wants a husband and family, but firmly rejects the traditional 1950’s concept of a woman’s place. This ambition to achieve personal and career goals is perhaps one reason that she has been labeled a protofeminist. Plath's letters were published in 1975, edited and selected by her mother Aurelia Plath. The collection Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 came out partly in response to the strong public reaction to the publication of The Bell Jar in America. [36] Plath began keeping a diary from the age of 11 and continued doing so until her suicide. Her adult diaries, starting from her first year at Smith College in 1950, were published in 1982 as The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Frances McCullough, with Ted Hughes as consulting editor. In 1982, when Smith College acquired Plath's remaining journals, Hughes sealed two of them until February 11, 2013, the 50th anniversary of Plath's death. [76]

She obtained a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College, one of the two women-only colleges of the University of Cambridge in England, where she continued actively writing poetry and publishing her work in the student newspaper Varsity. At Newnham, she studied with Dorothea Krook, whom she held in high regard. [23] She spent her first year winter and spring holidays traveling around Europe. [5] Career and marriage [ edit ] Plath's stay at McLean Hospital inspired her novel The Bell Jar In his 1972 book on suicide, The Savage God, friend and critic Al Alvarez claimed that Plath's suicide was an unanswered cry for help, [43] and spoke, in a BBC interview in March 2000, about his failure to recognize Plath's depression, saying he regretted his inability to offer her emotional support: "I failed her on that level. I was thirty years old and stupid. What did I know about chronic clinical depression? She kind of needed someone to take care of her. And that was not something I could do." [47] Plath's grave at Heptonstall church, West Yorkshire Following Plath's death [ edit ]

At times, Plath was able to overcome the “tension between the perceiver and the thing-in-itself by literally becoming the thing-in-itself,” wrote Newman. “In many instances, it is nature who personifies her.” Similarly, Plath used history “to explain herself,” writing about the Nazi concentration camps as though she had been imprisoned there. She said, “I think that personal experience shouldn’t be a kind of shut box and mirror-looking narcissistic experience. I believe it should be generally relevant, to such things as Hiroshima and Dachau, and so on.” Newman explained that, “in absorbing, personalizing the socio-political catastrophes of the century, [Plath] reminds us that they are ultimately metaphors of the terrifying human mind.” Alvarez noted that the “anonymity of pain, which makes all dignity impossible, was Sylvia Plath’s subject.” Her reactions to the smallest desecrations, even in plants, were “extremely violent,” wrote Hughes. “Auschwitz and the rest were merely the open wounds.” In sum, Newman believed, Plath “evolved in poetic voice from the precocious girl, to the disturbed modern woman, to the vengeful magician, to Ariel—God’s Lioness.” In the first section of the journals, dated 1950 to 1955, it is clear that Plath’s urge to write sprang not only from her driving ambition but also from her need to justify her life, to confirm her identity even as she searched for it. She asks repeatedly who she is and answers with lists of achievements or tentative identifications: “’a passionate, fragmentary girl,’ maybe?” In the midst of adolescent rites of courtship and stirrings of passion, as she perfects herself as “the American virgin, dressed to seduce,” she states that her “happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of [her] life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper.” Milton asked about the picture. We talked a little about art and drawing. They were all so nice. I think they may have been relieved at my narrow escape; they may have expected me to cry. They knew, though, they knew. The Colossus, Heinemann (London, England), 1960, published as The Colossus and Other Poems, Knopf (New York, NY), 1962.

The Journals of Sylvia Plath. Faber & Faber. February 17, 2011. ISBN 9780571266357. Archived from the original on February 10, 2022 . Retrieved October 4, 2021. The United States Postal Service introduced a postage stamp featuring Plath in 2012. [100] [101] [102] An English Heritage plaque records Plath's residence at 3 Chalcot Square, in London. [29] Plath was clinically depressed for most of her adult life, and was treated multiple times with early versions of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). [3] She ended her own life in 1963.

Plath seemed to make a good recovery and returned to college. In January 1955, she submitted her thesis The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoyevsky's Novels, and in June graduated from Smith with an A.B., summa cum laude. [20] She was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society, [14] and had an IQ of around 160. [21] [22] Jealous one I am, green-eyed, spite-seething. Read the six women poets in the ‘new poets of England and America.’ Dull, turgid.” – Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath Matthies, Gesa (2016). The Lady in the Book – Sylvia Plath, portraits. France. Archived from the original on September 14, 2018 . Retrieved September 13, 2018.

Helle, Anita, ed. (2007). The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-06927-9. New York Times Book Review, November 22, 1981, Denis Donoghue, "You Could Say She Had a Calling for Death," p. 1; August 27, 1989, Robert Pinsky, review of Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, p. 11; November 5, 2000, Joyce Carol Oates, "Raising Lady Lazarus," p. 10. Reading a glut of SatEvePost stories till my eyes ached these past days I realized the gap in my writing and theirs. My world is flat thin pasteboard, theirs full of babies, old dowagers, queer jobs and job lingo instead of set pieces ending in ‘I love you.'” – Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath Rose, Jacqueline (February 1, 1998). "The happy couple". The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on March 12, 2017. The Poet Speaks edited by Peter Orr, published by Barnes and Noble in New York City (1966), pp.167–172

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Dalrymple, Theodore (2010). Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality. London: Gibson Square Books. ISBN 978-1-906142-61-2. Clark, Heather L. (2020). Red Comet: The short life and blazing art of Sylvia Plath (Firsted.). New York: Knopf. ISBN 978-0-307-96116-7. OCLC 1128061536. Kean, Danuta (April 11, 2017). "Unseen Sylvia Plath letters claim domestic abuse by Ted Hughes". The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on April 15, 2020 . Retrieved April 14, 2017. Moore, Honor (March 2009). "After Ariel: Celebrating the poetry of the women's movement". Boston Review. Archived from the original on July 11, 2017. Middlebrook, Diane. (2003). Her Husband: Hughes and Plath– a Marriage. New York: Viking. ISBN 0-670-03187-9

Wagner-Martin, Linda, Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage, Routledge & Kegan Paul (London, England), 1988.

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Published by William Heineman, Ltd. in London, Alfred A. Knopf in New York City in 1962, and Faber and Faber in 1976 a b Thorpe, Vanessa (March 19, 2000). "I failed her. I was 30 and stupid". The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on March 20, 2016. Newman, Charles, editor, The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1970. Poem published in London Magazine, later printed in Tri-Quarterly in Fall 1966, and published in Naked Poetry in 1969. Revised and published in Pursuit in 1973. Published as a book with facsimile manuscript by The Pioneer Valley Printing Company as a limited edition of 150 copies in 1982. McCullough, Frances (2005) [1963]. Introduction. The Bell Jar. By Plath, Sylvia (1st Harper Perennial Classicsed.). New York: Perennial Classics. ISBN 0-06-093018-7.