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Sylvia Plath

Mothers of the Mind: The remarkable women who shaped Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie and Sylvia Plath by Rachel Trethewey

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April 2024, no. 463
Morag Fraser reviews ‘Mothers of the Mind: The remarkable women who shaped Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie and Sylvia Plath’ by Rachel Trethewey

Reading for this review I came across some apposite words by Jacqueline Rose, biographer of Sylvia Plath, cultural analyst and explorer of the lives and roles of women:

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The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 2: 1956–1963 edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil

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January-February 2019, no. 408
Sarah Holland-Batt reviews 'The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 2: 1956–1963' edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil

Sylvia Plath wrote her last letter to the American psychiatrist Dr Ruth Beuscher a week prior to her suicide on 11 February 1963. In it, Plath castigates herself for being guilty of ‘Idolatrous love’, a concept she drew from psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving. ‘I lost myself in Ted instead of finding myself ...

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The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume 1: 1940-1956 by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil

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April 2018, no. 400
Felicity Plunkett reviews 'The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1: 1940-1956' edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil

‘A letter always seemed to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend,’ wrote Emily Dickinson. Yet part of the lure of letters – and life writing generally – is a sense of the corporeal, the promise of discovering the writer herself. As Jacqueline Rose suggests, writing about biography and ...

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'Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath: A Bystander’s Recollections' by Peter Porter

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August 2001, no. 233
'Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath: A Bystander’s Recollections' by Peter Porter

I should make it clear at the start of these discursive memories that I knew Ted Hughes only slightly and Sylvia Plath hardly at all. But I lived in fairly close proximity to their ascent to fame in the 1950s and 1960s and knew much more closely some of the personalities intimately involved in the crisis in the lives of these two remarkable poets ...

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