On Thursday, 9 January 2020, I had the privilege to share the stage with a panel of Sylvia Plath scholars--Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick (organizer and presenter), Heather Clark (presenter), and Janet Badia (respondent)---at the MLA conference in Seattle. Our topic was "New Developments in Sylvia Plath Studies: Archives, Biography, and Feminism". The audience was small, but that did not have any bearing on our passion for our respective pieces. After my talk, entitled "The Indefatigable Sylvia Plath", Heather presented "P(l)athography: Sylvia Plath and Her Biographers" which provided an overview of the role Plath biographies have played in pathologizing their subject. This was followed by Julie's "'Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children': Sylvia Plath's Representations of Assia Wevill", an investigation on Wevill's role as a muse in Sylvia Plath's poetry. Janet responded with an eloquent summation of our talks asking...

Congratulations to Janet Badia, whose book Sylvia Plath and the Mythology of Women Readers was recently published by University of Massachusetts Press. You can purchase the book from Amazon.com ; UMass Press ; Amazon.co.uk ; and you can like it on Facebook . The book looks most promising and I expect to review it on this blog before too long. Chapters include: Introduction: "There Is No Such Thing as a Death Girl": Literary Bullying and the Plath Reader; "Dissatisfied, Family-Hating Shrews": Women Readers and the Politics of Sylvia Plath's Literary Reception;  "Oh, You Are Dark": The Plath Reader in Popular Culture; "We Did Not Wish to Give the Impression": Plath Fandom and the Question of Representation; "A Fiercely Fought Defense": Ted Hughes and the Plath Reader; and Conclusion: "I Don’t Mean Any Harm": Frieda Hughes, Plath Readers, and the Question of Resistance.

I recently found two additional publications we can look forward to this year. 1.) Badia, Janet. Sylvia Plath and the Mythology of Women Readers . Amherst: Univ Of Massachusetts Pr, 2011. from the UMass Press New Books Spring/Summer 2011 catalog: Depicted in popular films, television series, novels, poems, and countless media reports, Sylvia Plath’s women readers have become nearly as legendary as Plath herself, in large part because the depictions are seldom kind. If one is to believe the narrative told by literary and popular culture, Plath’s primary audience is a body of young, misguided women who uncritically —even pathologically— consume Plath’s writing with no awareness of how they harm the author’s reputation in the process. Janet Badia investigates the evolution of this narrative, tracing its origins, exposing the gaps an delisions that have defined it, and identifying it as a bullying mythology whose roots lie in a long history of ungenerous, if not outright misogynistic, rhet...