The unnamed speaker of “Lady Lazarus” is commonly taken as an autobiographical representation of Sylvia Plath herself, due to the similarities between details in the poem and the facts of Plath’s own life. For example, she mentions that she is a “smiling woman” of 30 years of age, which was Plath’s age when she wrote the poem (19). Furthermore, her references to her earlier brushes with death — the first, “an accident” and the second intentional — track with Plath’s biography: she almost died in a swimming accident at age ten, and nearly ten years before writing “Lady Lazarus,” she attempted to end her life by overdosing on sleeping pills (36). In fact, Lady Lazarus seems to be the name she has adopted for herself, playing off the biblical story of Lazarus and upending the reader’s expectations from the very beginning of the poem.

Whether or not Lady...