Skip to main content

Reviews of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2

This blog post was modified, to add links, on 12 December 2018.--pks

The immediacy of Twitter has often inadvertently led to the absence of some information on Sylvia Plath appearing on this blog. For example, the reviews of the Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2 have been tweeted and recorded on my bibliography of reviews of Plath's work on my website, but not here. So I thought I might do a little blog post to post the reviews and include links to however many that I can which appear online. Linking to reviews is presently a feature on my website that I do not take the time to do. Perhaps I should? Probably not, I still fear the breaking of links as it what so often happened earlier in this century.


Here are the reviews, including some pieces which are more coverage of the book, of Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2 that have been published to date (or will be shortly--Rollyson and Schoerke). Some are behind paywalls and one just is not online. Some were printed in the newspaper on a date different to when it appeared online and often with a different title...which makes bibliography in the 21st-century really difficult. For some, like the Financial Times, I have not see the printed version so page numbers are missing. Lastly, some reviews, like Paul Alexander's, appeared in several subsequent newspapers but I have only listed the first appearance.

Adams, Alexander. "The poetry and the pain." Spiked. November 13, 2018.

Alexander, Paul, "Plath's Joy and Desolation." The Washington Post. November 4, 2018: E10.

Bate, Jonathan. "I now see the man I loved is dead." The Times. September 8, 2018: 13.

Bayley, Sally. "Plath's Passions." Literary Review. October 2018: 22-23.

Biggs, Joanna. "I'm an intelligence." London Review of Books. December 20, 2018: 9-15.

Carey, John. "Dispatches from a heart in agony." Sunday Times. September 9, 2018: 36.

Chiasson, Dan. "'The Girl That Things Happen To'." The New Yorker. November 5, 2018: 62-7.

Clark, Alex. "Who was the real Sylvia Plath?" Financial Times. October 5, 2018.

Cooke, Rachael. "Sylvia's Plath and other torments." The Observer. September 9, 2018: 44-5.

Ferri, Jessica. "Revealed: Sylvia Plath's Last Desperate Letters." The Daily Beast. November 9, 2018.

Haas, Lidija. "New Books." Harper's. October 2018: 83-6.

Lowry, Elizabeth. "Marriage as religion...Plath's correspondence captures life with Ted Hughes in all its joys and agonies." The Guardian. September 19, 2018: 16-17.

Lowry, Elizabet. "Books of the Year 2018." TLS. November 20, 2018.

Marriott, James. "Books of the Year 2018." The Times. November 23, 2018.

Meyers, Jeffrey. "Plath has the last wounding word." Standpoint. November 2018: 50-2.

Parker, James. "The Haunting Last Letters of Sylvia Plath." The Atlantic. January/February 2019.

Pierre, Summer. "Sylvia Plath's Last Plan." The New Yorker.

Raine, Craig. "'Ted is liar. Ted beats me up. Ted wishes me dead': Sylvia Plath descends into madness and misery." The Spectator. September 15, 2018: 31-2.

Renolds, Gillian. "Radio Review." The Sunday Times. December 2, 2018.

Roiphe, Katie, "Mad Girl's Love Song." The New York Times Book Review. November 10, 2018: 39.

Rollyson, Carl. "Sylvia out in the cold." The New Criterion. December 2018: 78-82.

Schoerke, Meg. "'I know the bottom, she says': Sylvia Plath's Correspondence 2." The Hudson Review. Autumn 2018: 629-39.

Seaman, Donna. "The Letters of Sylvia Plath." Booklist. October 1, 2018.

Sehgal, Parul. "A Marriage Falters and Masks Fall Away." The New York Times. October 24, 2018: C4.

Solly, Meilan. "Sylvia Plath's Last Letters Paint Visceral Portrait of Her Marriage, Final Years." Smithsonian.com. October 31, 2018.

Sullivan, Hannah. "Revealing Sylvia Plath." TLS. November 2, 2018: 3-4.

"The Letters of Sylvia Plath." [Starred Review] Kirkus Reviews. August 1, 2018.

"The Letters of Sylvia Plath." [Starred Review] Publishers Weekly. August 6, 2018.

Thomson, Ian. "The suffering poet who sighed for lost Edens." Catholic Herald. November 22, 2018.

Wagner, Erica. "In sorrow and in anger." New Statesman. September 19, 2017: 67.

Weatherby, Lonnie. "The Letters of Sylvia Plath." Library Journal. October 1, 2018: 59.

"A well-worn Plath." Private Eye. September 21-October 4, 2018: 34.

Wilson, Andrew. "The darkness that claimed Sylvia Plath." Evening Standard. September 20, 2018: 40.

Wilson, Andrew. "Chaos & Creativity." Radio Times. November 24-30, 2018: 146-47.

Wood, Gaby. "'Now, I shall grow out of his shadow...' — Sylvia Plath's last letter." The Telegraph. September 15, 2018: 8-9.

Yandava, Ramya. "The Last Letters of Sylvia Plath." Cornell Daily Sun. November 13, 2018.

All links accessed 15 and 16 November and 12 December 2018.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove...

Some final photographs of Sylvia Plath

Susan O'Neill-Roe took a series of photographs of Sylvia Plath and her children from October to late November (or maybe early December) 1962 while she was a day nanny/mother's help at Court Green. From nearby Belstone , it was a short drive to North Tawton and the aid she provided enabled Plath to complete the masterful October and November poems and also to make day or overnight trips to London for poetry business and other business.  Some of O'Neill-Roe's photographs are well-known.  However, a cache of photographs formed a part of the papers of failed biographer Harriet Rosenstein. They were sold separately from the rest of her papers that went to Emory. I was fortunate enough to see low resolution scans of them a while back so please note these are being posted today as mere reference quality images.  There are two series here. The first of the children with Plath dressed in red and black. (This should be referred to in the future, please, as Plath's  Stendhal-c...

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...