Sylvia Plath?

Question

After having answered a question a bit ago, it got me thinking about how much i wanted to read about this...

What is the best biography on Sylvia Plath to read????

I have read the Bell Jar , but that was semi auto biographical, i want something thats about her whole life. I understand she had quite a sad life but im really interested imn reading about her...

Answer 1

The Journals are good and then there's The Death and life of Sylvia Plath by Ronald Hayman.

The film "Sylvia" isn't great but it might be worth a watch if you haven't seen it yet

Answer 2

You could try this;

Malcolm, Janet: The Silent Woman. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

* London: Picador 1994
* Vintage Books 1995, Paperback
click here to order from amazon.com

On the difficulties of writing a biography about Sylvia Plath: This book compares the existing biographies and discusses the influence of Olwyn Hughes on Stevenson's biography of Plath. It is not a biography in itself. --Anja Beckmann


I enjoyed this one. It does include information on Plath's life.The other biographies written have all in some way been criticised, either for their licence or value considering the strict censorship imposed by Ted Hughes and his sister. But I would really, really recommend her collected journals. They're wonderful.

Answer 3

A good read is the The journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962.
This is a transcription of the journals kept by Sylvia Plath over the last 12 years of her life. It gives insight into her final years and the evolution of her last poems. You can get the book at a discount price on Amazon.co.uk.

Answer 4

It is hazardous to apply psychiatric diagnoses to people long after they are dead. Sometimes the psychotic mania of bipolar can look a lot like a psychotic episode of schizophrenia, for example. In Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Kay Redfield Jamison includes Plath among those artists who clearly had a mood disorder, but she doesn't go as far as to diagnose it more specifically than that. She knows better. She's a psychiatrist. There are many other artists for whom the evidence of a particular diagnosis are much more clear. Schizophrenia often co-exists with depression. But Plath could have been bipolar. Or, if she were still around to quiz in more detail about how her experiences matched the current diagnostic criteria, she might turn out to have some other affective disorder, or combination of disorders. But in the absence of more evidence, we have to conclude that we aren't sure.

Answer 5

The Bell Jar is excellent but I think it has a very bad ending where she kills herself. I would have wished Bell ended differently. It would have been far more interesting if the main character continued writing her poems but instead, Plath's biographer chose to kill off the protagonist in the final chapter.
I hope I didnt give away the ending for you. But Im sure you'd already guessed it since the general tone of the story was heading in this direction all along. All in all a very depressing but highly insightful account of total miserableness.

Answer 6

The journals of Sylvia Plath are fascinating.

Answer 7

You can gain another perspective on her life by reading some of Ted Hughes' works. He was married to her if you didn't know. He cheated on her which added to her depression. Some of his poems are about her. He also wrote a really intimate book called 'The Birthday Letters' which gives a detailed account of aspects of their life together

Answer 8

her journals are a good place to start, if you aren't against that sort of thing. i always feel sort of... guilty by reading them, but obviously not enough to stop.

there is the version ted hughes put out and then an unabridged version. i didn't know about the second one until recently--i think it might be better then the hughes edited version. i'm not sure

Answer 9

The Bell Jar - it is one of my all time favorite books. But beware, because her life was less than a happy one...