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Links, reviews, etc. - Week ending 6 December 2008

  • Amazon.com began listing Sylvia Plath's Fiction: A Critical Study by Luke Ferretter (University of Edinburgh Press). Amazon.com lists the publication date to be on May 15, 2009. Edinburgh University Press lists publication date to be July 2009. Regardless, look for it. Based on what I know of Ferretter's work, and what I've read & heard, I think it is safe for me to give advanced, unseen praise for this book.

    The product description on Amazon.com reads:

    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 novel The 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 He encompasses both published and unpublished material, tracing Plath's influences, style, politics, and place in the history of postmodern fiction.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.

    Key features:
    • First full-length study of Plath's fiction
    • Comprehensive discussion of Plath's unpublished short fiction
    • Extensive discussion of Plath's short fiction as a whole.

    This is a very worthy and welcome subject, and Ferretter's book will undoubtedly bring much needed and wider recognition to Plath's fiction.


  • Ebay and Bloomsbury will have a live auction on 11 December for a first edition The Colossus by Sylvia Plath (Heinemann, 1960). Quite a rare book, and typically expensive, it might be possible to snatch this up at a bargain.

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Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

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Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

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Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last