Sylvia Plath

In this engaging and original study Elisabeth Bronfen examines Sylvia Plath's poetry, her novel The Bell Jar, her shorter fiction as well as her autobiographical texts, in the context of the resilient Plath-Legend that has grown since her suicide in 1963 and to which, after over three decades of silence, Ted Hughes responded with his collection of commemorative poems, Birthday Letters. Arguing that although we cannot sever our reading of Plath's work from the critical and biographical writings about her, the study nevertheless offers close readings of texts to explore the various self-fashionings in poetry and prose which this highly ambivalent poet developed. The central theme to which this study returns is Plath's insistence on a clandestine traumatic knowledge of fallibility and fragility underlying the fiction of success, health and happiness so prevalent in post-World War Two. Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English at the University of Zurich.