The Journals of Sylvia Plath

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The final section of the journals contains entries from the summer of 1958 through the fall of 1959, when Plath lived in Boston. The last real entry is dated November 15, 1959, from Yaddo, prior to Plath and Hughes’s return to England to await the birth of their first child. The last years of her life are represented by a piece titled “The Inmate,” written between February 27 and March 6, 1961, when Plath was in the hospital having her appendix removed, and by a series of sketches of her Devon neighbors dated February through July, 1962.

It’s hopeless to “get life” if you don’t keep notebooks.” – Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Brain, Tracy (2006). "Dangerous Confessions: The Problem of Reading Sylvia Plath Biographically". In Jo Gill (ed.). Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-33969-3. Egeland, M. (2014). "Before and After a Poet's Suicide: The Reception of Sylvia Plath". International Journal of the Book. 11 (3): 27–36. doi: 10.18848/1447-9516/CGP/v11i03/37023. At the end of this section, the editors have appended a note stating that journals no longer exist (if they ever did) for the two years following Plath’s suicide attempt, so that while the dates given are 1950 to 1955, the final entry is dated July 14, 1953. This two-year gap is the first that readers will bemoan, since ideas for The Bell Jar and many poems originated from this time. Sylvia Plath – Poet | Academy of American Poets". Poets.org. February 4, 2014. Archived from the original on February 4, 2017 . Retrieved March 9, 2018. Some in the feminist movement saw Plath as speaking for their experience, as a "symbol of blighted female genius". [43] Writer Honor Moore describes Ariel as marking the beginning of a movement, Plath suddenly visible as "a woman on paper", certain and audacious. Moore says: "When Sylvia Plath's Ariel was published in the United States in 1966, American women noticed. Not only women who ordinarily read poems, but housewives and mothers whose ambitions had awakened ... Here was a woman, superbly trained in her craft, whose final poems uncompromisingly charted female rage, ambivalence, and grief, in a voice with which many women identified." [98] Some feminists threatened to kill Hughes in Plath's name. [43]

Bates, Stephen (March 23, 2009). "Son of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes kills himself". The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on March 12, 2017. Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. [4] [5] Her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath (1906–1994), was a second-generation American of Austrian descent, and her father, Otto Plath (1885–1940), was from Grabow, Germany. [6] Plath's father was an entomologist and a professor of biology at Boston University who wrote a book about bumblebees. [7]

Kean, Danuta (April 11, 2017). "Unseen Sylvia Plath letters claim domestic abuse by Ted Hughes". The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on April 15, 2020 . Retrieved April 14, 2017.