Volume 23, Number 11 · June 24, 1976
Sylvia Plath's Apotheosis
By Karl Miller
Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963
by Sylvia Plath, selected and edited by Aurelia Schober Plath
Harper & Row, 502 pp., $12.50
Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness
by Edward Butscher
Seabury/Continuum, 388 pp., $15.95
Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath
by Judith Kroll
Harper & Row, 320 pp., $12.50 (To be published in July.)
These three books about Sylvia Plath have all been coming out within the space of a few months. They are not the first books on this subject, and they will not be the last. Ever since her death in 1963 she has been the goddess of a cult, whose homage has tended, in a romantic spirit, to represent her as a victim of the hard world that poets must inhabit: more recently, and less disarmingly, it has also tended to represent her as a victim of the cruelties and deprivations to which women have been subjected by the supremacy of the male. When her former husband, the poet Ted Hughes, appears in public, women yell abuse at him, ask how Sylvia is keeping, and ask about her suicide. There's a woman's poem which refers to Ted's friend and Sylvia's rival, Assia Gutman, who also committed suicide: 'Hughes has one more gassed out life on his mind.'
Review, 5214 words
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