The controversy peaked when the only biography to receive the estate's cooperation, Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (1989), presented her as a spoiled product of the 1950s whose egoistic rage inspired brilliant but obsessive poetry. Stevenson's biography was meant to redress a too-sympathetic picture in Wagner-Martin's biography, and Paul Alexander's Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath (1991) in turn tempered the harshness of Stevenson's book. Another recent biography, Ronald Hayman's The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (1991), is as much a reflection on the difficulty of writing about her life as it is a conventional biography. Jacqueline Rose's The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991) and Janet Malcolm's The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1994) are contentious but valuable accounts of the difficulties that the Plath estate has caused for critics and biographers.
The estate's strict control of copyright and its editing of such writings as Plath's journals and letters have caused the most serious problems for scholars. Yet even without these obstacles to interpretation Plath's identity would seem mysterious. Her life seems mythical rather than historical because she herself made her life the substance of her art. Her constant theme, the transformation and rebirth of the self, has given her readers multiple and sometimes contradictory versions of that self.
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