Emory:

Ted Hughes Papers, Emory University

JP:

Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams

LH:

Letters Home

Lilly:

Sylvia Plath Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University

LWM:

Linda Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life

Maryland:

Frances McCullough Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland, College Park

OH:

Olwyn Hughes

PA:

Paul Alexander, Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath

Smith:

Sylvia Plath Papers, Smith College Library, Special Collections

SP:

Sylvia Plath

SPCH:

Linda W. Wagner, Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage

SPWW:

Edward Butscher, Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work

TH:

Ted Hughes

THL:

Letters of Ted Hughes

Wherever possible, I have built this biography on primary sources I have read in the archives at Smith College, Indiana University, Emory University, the University of Maryland, and the British Library. I am grateful to Peter K. Steinberg, author of a perceptive introduction to Sylvia Plath, for providing additional primary sources. Letters Home, Karen V. Kukil’s scrupulous edition of Sylvia Plath’s journals, and Christopher Reid’s Letters of Ted Hughes form part of the bedrock of my narrative.

Although I diverge at various points from previous Plath biographies, I don’t see how my book could have been written without them. As Plath’s first biographer, Edward Butscher interviewed for the first time many of the key figures in his subject’s life. To be sure, Butscher made errors, and his “bitch goddess” thesis has been deplored, but he nevertheless deserves an honored place in Plath biography as a pathfinder, and my debt to him shows in the notes below. Paul Alexander accomplished a good deal in discovering much new material about Plath’s family and her childhood. His command of the details of Plath biography is such that I consulted his book continually as I composed my own. Linda Wagner-Martin’s literary biography was the first effort to integrate a full discussion of her subject’s literary sensibility and her life from a feminist perspective. I have often consulted Ronald Hayman’s elegant and succinct biography when deciding how to handle some of the thornier issues in Plath’s life.

Anne Stevenson is the only biographer to have had the sanction of the Plath estate and, as such, her work has certain built-in advantages in terms of access to material and the ability to quote. But it also has the disadvantages of the authorized biographer beholden to the literary executor. Paul Alexander wisely decided not to deal with the estate, so as to remain independent. I had several conversations with him while he was researching Plath’s life and concluded then that should I ever attempt a Plath biography, I would not seek cooperation from the estate. The result, as in Alexander’s case, is that I have quoted very sparingly in order to produce a fair use biography.

In my acknowledgments, I thank everyone I interviewed for this biography. My bibliography lists those books I found helpful in constructing my narrative. Below I have listed only those sources for individual chapters that are not identified in the text.

Acknowledgments: For my extended critique of Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman, see Biography: A User’s Guide.

Introduction: The word “Isis” appears on the typescript of “Edge,” SP’s last completed poem.

I first adumbrated the idea of SP as the Marilyn Monroe of modern literature in “Visions of Sylvia Plath,” the New York Sun, 17/2/04. Jacqueline Rose has something quite different in mind when she calls Plath the “Marilyn Monroe of the literati.” That may be true, but implicity in Rose’s words is the idea of a myth superimposed upon Plath. My point is that Plath herself made the connection to Monroe, who appeared to the poet in a dream-like vision of the creative, aspiring self, seeking a new look, and an ever-greater vision of self-fulfillment. I am indebted to Peter K. Steinberg, who discovered the rejected line in “A Winter’s Tale” in the New Yorker papers in the New York Public Library.

Plath’s parody of Dragnet: SP to Gordon Lameyer, 27/6/54, Maryland.

In No Man’s Land, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar mention the Varsity photo layout as an example of “female impersonation” akin to promotional strategies used by Edith Sitwell, Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Elinor Wylie. But the term impersonation does an injustice, it seems to me, to SP’s motivations. She was not merely impersonating what others wanted. She was far more implicated in her culture than such a term implies. Gilbert and Gubar reveal their misapprehension of Plath when they move away from the episode at Cambridge and begin a new paragraph with the words, “More seriously, in the same year Plath produced a poem…” SP calling herself Betty Grable may have been a joke, but it was also a part of her deeply ingrained need to display herself—and not just part of what Gilbert and Gubar call her “dutifully sexualized self.”

Stella Dallas as portrayed on the radio is a strong-willed and resourceful mother—much more positively portrayed than the lower class character of Prouty’s novel.

Chapter 1: For the details of SP’s childhood and early schooling I draw on her stories and essays published in JP and on EBP, as well as on Elizabeth Hinchliffe’s unpublished manuscript, “The Descent of Ariel: The Death of Sylvia Plath,” available at BL and Maryland. Wilbury Crockett’s impressions of Sylvia are taken from his 26/7/74 letter to AP in the Frances McCullough Papers at Maryland. In essays, poems, and fiction, SP drew on details of her life to create a persona, a mythology of the self, and the critic has a right to question how much of her retrospective writing is true. For example, she draws on her mother’s family experience during World War I, when German Americans were also under suspicion, to heighten her portrait of Otto the German. But what is true? Certain facts can, of course, be established. But in a figure as protean as SP, fact and fabulation are not easily disentangled.

SP’s early writings, including her letters from camp, are at Lilly. Her school reports are at Smith.

Susan R. Van Dyne cites AP’s 1/12/78 letter to Judith Kroll.

Sylvia often saw the world in terms of the movies. Her Philipps Junior High School report (14/5/46) on Longfellow’s poem Evangeline observes that the work would make an “effective movie scene, especially in technicolor,” with a mob of men “blazing with anger” protesting the decree that they must forfeit their lands to the crown. In their mad rush to the doorway, they shout, “Down with tyrants.”

Chapter 2: SP’s letters to Hans, to Marcia Brown, to Ann Davidow, Enid Epstein, Phil McCurdy, and Sally Rogers are at Smith.

Jane Anderson’s deposition, and the deposition of her therapist, are in Jane Anderson v. AVCO Embassy Pictures, which is in the Smith archive, as are SP’s letters to Anderson.