The Other Ariel

"Bundtzen argues that Plath's original plan represented a conscious response to her disintegrating marriage - the swearing off of an old life with Hughes and the creation of a new self as a woman and poet. The poems Hughes deleted show her in an angry dialogue over their marital breakup, with Plath writing several of these bitterly ironic poems on the verso of Hughes's manuscript for an unpublished play entitled "The Calm." Beneath the surface of Hughes's "calm" we see a tempest building, created by the woman who chose Shakespeare's Ariel as her poetic identity."--BOOK JACKET.