“... The exception is Sylvia Plath, who, with her perfect blond pageboy, wide smile and cinched-waist dresses, looked less like a proper poet and more like Doris Day. ... In the intervening decades she has become a protean figure, an emblem of different things to different people, depending upon their viewpoint — a visionary, a victim, a martyr, a feminist icon, a schizophrenic, a virago, a prisoner of gender — or, perhaps, a genius, as both Plath and Hughes maintained during her lifetime. ... One would think there is little to be added, if only because of the avalanche of books — biographies, meta-biographies, pathographies (to borrow
Joyce Carol Oates’s term), memoirs, critical studies, letters, journals, novels — that have been published about Plath since her suicide (which, for some people, is the only thing they know about her). In the last few years alone,
two fat volumes of her correspondence have been published and parsed by a whole raft of reviewers (including me). ...”
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