Sylvia Plath Critical Essay | Sylvia Plath and the Nature of Biography

Critical Essay by Dee Horne

SOURCE: "Biography in Disguise: Sylvia Plath's Journals," in Wascana Review, Vol. 27, No. 1, 1992, pp. 90-104.

[In the following essay, Horne details how Plath's published journals were manipulated by Hughes and his editor, thus providing a skewed rendering of Plath's life. Horne concludes that there is always room for interpretation in biography, even when analyzing works written by the subject.]

It's hopeless to "get life" if you don't keep notebooks.

Now to do what I must, then to do what I want: this book too becomes a litany of dreams, of directives and imperatives. [The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1982]

Many critics have erroneously labelled Plath a confessional writer. As Judith Kroll accurately observes in Chapters in a Mythology, Plath is not a confessional writer because her writing has distinctive characteristics which do not conform to those of confessional writers such as Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton:

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