Sylvia Plath | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 16 pages of analysis & critique of Sylvia Plath.
This section contains 4,660 words
(approx. 16 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Sylvia Plath and the Nature of Biography

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:

In a great deal...

(read more)

This section contains 4,660 words
(approx. 16 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Sylvia Plath and the Nature of Biography
Copyrights
Gale
Sylvia Plath and the Nature of Biography from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.