Showing posts with label Sylvia Plath. Show all posts

Friday, November 18, 2022

Book Review 085 / The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath - review

‘234 pages of pure brilliance’

Friday 8 July 2016

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best noveles / No 85 / The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)

orking in New York one summer, Esther Greenwood is a young, intelligent women on the edge of greatness. Though the ambition she once had to achieve her dreams (the ones which won her the awards, the prizes, the grades) have faded into a distant memory and she’s barely drifting along.

Heather Clark’s ‘Red Comet’ is an exhaustively researched, often brilliant biography of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath

Heather Clark’s ‘Red Comet’ is an exhaustively researched, often brilliant biography of Sylvia Plath

The 10 Best Books of 2021

Shifting the Focus From Sylvia Plath’s Tragic Death to Her Brilliant Life

How do we tell the story of Sylvia Plath?

By Paul Alexander
October 28, 2020

Almost six decades after her death, Sylvia Plath stands as the most consequential poet of her generation. As a feminine voice, she dominates the 20th century the way Emily Dickinson did the century before. At the time of Plath’s death at age 30, critic A. Alvarez wrote, “The loss to literature is inestimable.” The years have proved him right.

How do we tell the story of Sylvia Plath?

Variously depicted as a victim or a villain, perhaps no other writer has an afterlife more contested than Plath.

The 10 Best Books of 2021

Shifting the Focus From Sylvia Plath’s Tragic Death to Her Brilliant Life

Heather Clark’s ‘Red Comet’ is an exhaustively researched, often brilliant biography of Sylvia Plath

By Anna Leszkiewicz
14 October 2020

Sylvia Plath is standing in her vegetable garden. It’s a warm summer evening in Devon. In her arms she holds a great bundle of loose papers. At her feet, a bonfire blazes. While her mother and her daughter watch from the kitchen, she tears up page after page of writing. Leaning over the bonfire, she sets the papers alight and watches them burn.

Shifting the Focus From Sylvia Plath’s Tragic Death to Her Brilliant Life

The 10 Best Books of 2021

Shifting the Focus From Sylvia Plath’s Tragic Death to Her Brilliant Life

How do we tell the story of Sylvia Plath?

RED COMET
The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
By Heather Clark

What becomes a legend most? As suggested by the old black-and-white Blackglama fur ads, featuring Lena Horne, Diana Vreeland and Cher, among others, legends are people who have soared beyond fame or celebrity into a more rarefied, inaccessible stratosphere.

Sarah Churchwell / Who is Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath

Who is Sylvia Plath?

By Sarah Churchwell

April 5, 2013 6:14 pm

Fifty years after her death, Sylvia Plath continues to captivate writers

and readers. But her role as a ‘casus belli’ in the battle of the sexes

has also obscured the genius this much-mythologised poet

Ten of the best / Mirrors in literature

Ten of the best

Mirrors in literature

John Mullan looks in the glass

John Mullan

Saturdad 30 October 2010

Richard II, by William Shakespeare

A weak king but a consummate drama queen, Richard II sends for a looking glass when he finds himself about to be deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke. "Give me the glass, and therein will I read. / No deeper wrinkles yet?" Pronouncing his regal glory "brittle", he smashes the mirror on the ground, "For there it is, crack'd in a hundred shivers."

"Snow White", by the Brothers Grimm

Those famous lines addressed by the evil, vain queen to her magic mirror were originally in German: "Spieglein, Spieglein, an der Wand / Wer ist die Schönste im ganzen Land?" "You are," is always the mirror's answer, until one day the mirror tells her that her beauty has been surpassed by that of her step-daughter, Snow White . . .

"The Lady of Shalott", by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The eponymous lady is condemned to watch the world indirectly, via a mirror that exhibits to her the shifting scenes of Camelot. "A curse is on her" if she look directly from her casement. But then Sir Lancelot rides by, and she cannot resist a gander. Oh dear. "The mirror crack'd from side to side; / 'The curse is come upon me,' cried / The Lady of Shalott."

Through the Looking-Glass, by Lewis Carroll

Alice is playing with her kittens in front of a large mirror. "How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty?" she asks. Before you know it, she is up on the mantelpiece. "Let's pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it's turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It'll be easy enough to get through."

Dracula, by Bram Stoker A mirror shows Jonathan Harker that he really is in a fix. "This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection of him in the mirror!" Gulp!

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

Dorian is in the habit of taking a mirror up to the locked room containing his portrait and comparing his reflection with the increasingly horrid image on the canvas. When he realises what a monster he has become, he becomes another mirror-smasher. "He loathed his own beauty, and flinging the mirror on the floor, crushed it into silver splinters beneath his heel."

"I Look into My Glass", by Thomas Hardy

For the ageing poet, a mirror is a cruel thing. "I look into my glass, / And view my wasting skin, / And say, 'Would God it came to pass / My heart had shrunk as thin!'"Hardy sees his wasting frame but feels the old "throbbings of noontide".

"Mirror", by Sylvia Plath

Plath finds a mirror thoroughly uncanny. "I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. / Whatever I see I swallow immediately / Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike." A woman gazes intro this glass, which is as unpitying as Hardy's. "In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish".

"The Mirrror", by Paul Muldoon

Muldoon's poem in memory of his father imagines another malign mirror, taking his father's "breath away" when he took it down from the wall. Now the dead man's life has gone into the glass. "When I took hold of the mirror / I had a fright. I imagined him breathing through it." Father and son seem to replace the mirror together.

The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters

The most overtly supernatural event in Waters's novel involves a mirror. Rod, heir to spooky Hundreds Hall, tells the narrator that he has just seen a mirror on a stand walk its way across his bedroom. Is he cracking up? Or is there a poltergeist? Hauntingly (in every sense) the novel ends with the narrator catching his own reflection in a mirror.

THE GUARDIAN

Sunday, September 24, 2017

'Dearest Teddy' / Sylvia Plath's love letters to Ted Hughes published for the first time

Sylvia Plath

'Dearest Teddy': Sylvia Plath's love letters to Ted Hughes published for the first time

22 SEPTEMBER 2017 • 10:00PM

Fifteen passionate love letters from Sylvia Plath to Ted Hughes are to be published for the first time, throwing new light on one of the most famous marriages of the 20th century.

Plath wrote the letters when she was studying at Cambridge University, fresh from their honeymoon. They had been apart for a few days, a separation she described as “this huge whistling hole in my guts and heart”.

Sylvia Plath / The choice

THE CHOICE

by Sylvia Plath

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”

Monday, May 23, 2016

The 100 best nonfiction books / No 17 / Ariel by Sylvia Plath (1965)

The 100 best nonfiction books: No 17 – Ariel by Sylvia Plath (1965)

The groundbreaking collection of work that established Plath as one of the last century’s most original and gifted poets

Robert McCrum
Monday 23 May 2016 05.44 BST

ith Birthday Letters (No 4), this series has already identified the radioactivity buried within the work of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, and recognised their place in the canon. With Ariel, Plath’s second volume of poems, we approach the catalyst for 20th-century poetry’s thermonuclear explosion.

First, the terrible circumstances surrounding the first appearance of Ariel are essential to any reading of Plath’s work. In the early years of her marriage to Ted Hughes, Plath had been the junior partner. She was known as the author of The Colossus: and Other Poems (1960), a well-received first collection, described by the Guardian as an “outstanding technical accomplishment”, but not yet indicating the extraordinary power locked within Plath’s literary psyche.

The key to Plath’s final years, on top of the disintegration of her marriage to Hughes, lies in her lifelong fascination with her own death. As she expresses it in Ariel, her title poem, “I am the arrow… that flies. Suicidal, at one with the drive. Into the red eye...” Everything she wrote now was shadowed by this obsession.

Between 1961 and ’62, working fast and urgently, she completed her autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, writing to her mother that what she had done “is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalising to add colour – I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown… I’ve tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar.”

The Bell Jar was released by William Heinemann (publisher of The Colossus) in London on 14 January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. This was a decision inspired by Plath’s desire to spare the feelings of her mother and a number of real-life characters in the novel. Plath’s first novel appeared in the midst of the most bitter English winter of the century, and aroused virtually no comment.

Meanwhile, Plath had begun to put together the manuscript that became the framework for Ariel in early 1962. Restlessly focusing her poetic intention, she had changed its title from The Rival to A Birthday Present to Daddy to The Rabbit Catcher and finally to Ariel and Other Poems. She was now separated from Ted Hughes, whose affair with Assia Wevill had precipitated their break-up, and living alone with her two small children, Nick and Frieda, near Primrose Hill, London, in a house, 23 Fitzroy Road, once occupied by W B Yeats. By November 1962, she was done.

Then, in the early morning hours of her last few weeks, she wrote those poems that, as she herself predicted, would “make my name”. All the poems written during the autumn of 1962, and into the new year, had been inspired by the intense solitude of her situation, and many of the final poems in Ariel are attributable to her predicament as a young single mother, but also to her clinical depression and the incipient breakdown that culminated in her suicide in the early morning of 11 February 1963. (Al Alvarez’s account of this tragedy in his study of suicide, The Savage God, remains the indispensable portrait of this psychodrama.)

The poignant circumstances of Plath’s death, as they became known, intensified the Anglo-American literary interest in the poet and her work. In 1965, The Bell Jar was republished under her own name and quickly recognised as a dark classic of contemporary feminism. But it was the publication of Ariel in the same year (1966 in the US) that set the seal on her posthumous fame and reputation. Here was a collection of strange, disturbing, and confessional poems whose wild and exhilarating ferocity exerted a remarkable grip on the imagination of a new generation.

Robert Lowell, in his preface to the first edition of Ariel, describes these as poems that are “playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder”. He was acknowledging what countless subsequent readers would discover for themselves: that Ariel is the volume on which Plath’s reputation as one of the most original, daring and gifted poets of the last century rests.

The manuscript Plath had left behind on her death was titled Ariel and Other Poems. But that manuscript would not appear for more than 40 years. Instead, a rather different book called simply Ariel (published by Faber & Faber) reached bookshops in the UK in 1965 and sold a phenomenal 15,000 copies in 10 months. In the US edition (varying slightly from the UK edition), 12 of Plath’s chosen poems were cut, 15 new ones added in their place; and several other poems moved from their original order.

Ted Hughes – of whom, towards the end of her life, she had written “I hate and despise him so I can hardly speak” – had made the changes, inviting many searching and explosive questions about his apparent conflict of interest as Plath’s executor and also the subject of her poetry. A generation would pass before an enraged feminist critique softened into a belated recognition that Hughes had fulfilled an almost impossible task with remarkable sensitivity and understanding. After all, the manuscript left behind at her death was still a work in progress.

Among these groundbreaking, and often difficult, poems are numbered several classics: Lady Lazarus, Ariel, The Moon and the Yew Tree, Daddy and Stings. Plath’s fierce interrogation of herself and her feelings, and her unflinching honesty, came as a shocking revelation to poetry readers in the mid-1960s. Eventually, the Ariel of 1965, edited by Ted Hughes, was complemented in 2004 by a new edition, masterminded by Frieda Hughes, Plath’s faithful daughter, which for the first time restored the selection and arrangement of the poems as her mother had left them.

In addition, finally, there is Ted Hughes’s own response (in Birthday Letters) to his dead wife’s phoenix-like resurgence. One of the most disturbing poems here is Suttee, his record of Plath’s emergence as a poet, in which Hughes casts himself as a midwife delivering an “explosion / Of screams” and before being “engulfed / In a flood, a dam-burst thunder / Of a new myth”, a birth that “sucked the oxygen out of both of us”.

Many of the poems in Birthday Letters address the conundrum of Plath’s other self. Hughes had already rehearsed this line of thought in his 1982 foreword to the first edition of Plath’s journals, claiming that, although he had “spent every day with her for six years, and was rarely separated from her for more than two or three hours at a time”, he had never seen “her show her real self to anybody – except, perhaps, in the last three months of her life”.

Despite the unreconciled dialogue between husband and wife, in many conflicting registers, Ariel survives the obsessive extra-literary attention directed towards Plath and Hughes in the more than 50 years since Plath’s suicide. For many readers, it is likely to remain one of the great volumes in the Anglo-American canon.

A signature sentence

“Dying

Is an art, like everything else,

I do it exceptionally well.”

From Lady Lazarus, Ariel

Three to compare

A Alvarez: The Savage God (1974)

Sylvia Plath: Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-63 (ed Aurelia Plath) (1975)

Sylvia Plath: The Unabridged Journals (ed Karen V Kukil) (2000)

Ariel by Sylvia Plath is published in a Faber Modern Classics edition (£10.39).

THE GUARDIAN

THE 100 BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF ALL TIME

The 100 best nonfiction books of all time

001 The Sixth Extintion by Elizabeth Kolbert (2004)
002 The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion(2005)

003 No Logo by Noami Klein (1999)

004 Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes (1998)

005 Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama (1995)

006 A brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988)

007 The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe (1979)

008 Orientalism by Edward Said (1978)
009 Dispatches by Michael Herr (1977)
010 The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

011 North by Seamus Heaney (1975)

012 Awekenings by Oliver Sacks (1973)

013 The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)

014 Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom by Nick Cohn (1969)

015 The Double Helix by James D Watson (1968)

016 Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag (1966)

017 Ariel by Sylvia Plath (1965)

018 The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963)

019 The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson (1963)

020 Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)

021 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S Kuhn (1962)
022 A Grief Observed by CS Lewis (1961)

023 The Elements of Style by William Strunk and EB White (1959)
o24 The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith (1958)

025 The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life by Richard Hoggart (1957)

026 Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin (1955)

027 The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art by Kenneth Clark (1956)

028 The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin (1953)

029 Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1952 / 53)

030 A Book of Mediterranean Food by Elizabeth David (1950)

036 Black Boy by Richard Wright (1945)

Monday, May 4, 2015

The 100 best noveles / No 85 / The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 85

The Bell Jar

by Sylvia Plath

(1966)

Sylvia Plath’s painfully graphic roman à clef, in which a woman struggles with her identity in the face of social pressure, is a key text of Anglo-American feminism

Robert McCrum
Monday 4 May 2015 05.45 BST

Sylvia Plath’s only novel was originally published in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, and became tangled up almost immediately in the drama of her suicide, to the book’s detriment among the critics. However, republished under Plath’s own name in 1966, it became a modern classic.

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” After this brittle, dangerous introduction to the summer of 1953, we meet Esther Greenwood who is, she tells us, “supposed to be having the time of my life”. It’s a theme that, 40 years on, would become commercialised, even satirised, in Sex and the City.

But, in the age of Mad Men, Esther/Sylvia is far too driven, damaged and/or neurotic, and with too much emotional baggage, to have a ball in Manhattan. The story of her life and times, however, is told with blistering honesty, and a vivid attention to detail. It’s a raw, unsettling book with flashes of brilliance, a roman à clef that’s also a long, tormented footnote to Plath’s tormented poetry.

Plath herself had won an internship at Mademoiselle in New York City in 1953, and her painfully autobiographical novel draws heavily on her experience. The reader discovers, in flashbacks, why Esther cannot give herself wholeheartedly to her new life in the city. With hindsight, it’s easy to pick up the smell of death from Esther’s account. Hardly a page goes by without a reference to a dead baby, a cadaver, or her late father (“dead since I was nine”). The other man in her life, Yale boyfriend Buddy Willard, troubles her spirit in other ways, too.

Plath’s essential theme, a staccato drumbeat, is Esther’s obsession with the opposite sex. At first, released from her mother’s repressive scrutiny, she decides to lose her virginity (a “millstone around my neck”) to Constantin, a UN Russian translator, but he’s too sensible to fall for her. Then, having failed on another date, in which she is labelled a “slut”, she hurls her clothes off her hotel roof, and returns home for a suicidal summer, a worsening depression which she compares to suffocating under a “bell jar”. Esther’s predicament, more generally, is how to develop a mature identity, as a woman, and to be true to that self rather than conform to societal norms. It’s this quest that makes The Bell Jar a founding text of Anglo-American feminism.

Eventually, as Esther spirals lower, with successive suicide attempts, she is given shock treatment (ECT), echoing the Rosenbergs’ fate, in horrifying scenes, graphically described. Finally, another doctor gives her the longed-for diaphragm. “The next step,” says Esther, “was to find the proper sort of man.” Irwin, the maths professor, of course, turns out to be just the opposite, and the consequences of their intercourse dominate the final pages of the book until beautiful and well-adjusted Dr Nolan begins to steer Esther back to sanity, and a return to college.

A note on the text

In her journal for December 1958, Plath lists what she calls Main Questions, including: “What to do with hate for mother? Why don’t I write a novel?” After this latter question, she later added, in her own handwriting: “I have! August 22, 1961: THE BELL JAR.” Elsewhere, Ted Hughes has also confirmed that Plath began to write her only novel in 1961, completing it after the couple’s separation in 1962. In other words, The Bell Jar was written fast and urgently.

Plath told her mother that “What I’ve done is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalising to add colour – it’s a potboiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown… I’ve tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar.”

She also described the book as “an autobiographical apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the past”. At first, it was composed as part of the Eugene F Saxton Fellowship, a programme affiliated with the New York publisher Harper & Row whose immediate response to the manuscript was one of disappointment, after which Plath was free to offer it to publishers in London.

William Heinemann published The Bell Jar in London on 14 January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, a strategy inspired by her desire to spare the feelings of both her mother and a number of real-life characters in the novel, notably Buddy Willard (Dick Norton). Plath killed herself in her London flat, 23 Fitzroy Road, near Primrose Hill, less than a month later, on 11 February 1963.