Elaine Showalter is preparing a literary history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000.
MORE BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR
RELATED ARTICLES
26 October 1989
Meltdown
26 January 1995
A Storm in His Luggage
24 July 2003
Julian Maclaren-Ross
3 January 2002
On the Mitfords
9 August 2001
Burying André Malraux
22 February 2001
On Dawn Powell
20 July 2000
On Frank O’Hara
RELATED CATEGORIES
Literature and literary criticism, Plath, Sylvia, Biography and memoirs, 1900-1999, 1946-1999, 1946-1949, 1900-1999, 1946-1999, 1950-1959, 1900-1999, 1946-1999, 1960-1969
Vol. 13 No. 13 · 11 July 1991
pages 6-7 | 2940 words
Slick Chick
Elaine Showalter
- The Haunting of Sylvia Plath by Jacqueline Rose
Virago, 288 pp, £14.99, June 1991, ISBN 1 85381 307 9
- Passions of the Mind by A.S. Byatt
Chatto, 340 pp, £17.00, August 1991, ISBN 0 7011 3260 4
We all know the story. A brilliant, neurotic young American woman poet, studying on a fellowship at Cambridge, meets and marries the ‘black marauder’ who is the male poet-muse of her fantasies. Doubled and twinned – ‘one skin between us’, as she says; ‘two feet of one body’, as he says – they launch on the hard labour of poetic careers, supporting themselves on writing prizes and intermittent teaching jobs. She dreams that they will divide the kingdom of poetic fame; she will be ‘The Poetess of America’, as he will be ‘The Poet of England and her dominions’. But the marriage frays. Tied down to their two babies, frustrated at the slowness of success, she discovers that he is having an affair, and they separate. In the following months, she writes the greatest and angriest poems of her life, perhaps the greatest of her generation: but they are rejected by literary editors as ‘too extreme’. In the coldest winter of the century, at the age of 30, she commits suicide by gassing herself.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 13 No. 15 · 15 August 1991
From Richard Jacobs
Elaine Showalter (LRB, 11 July) refers to occasions when Sylvia Plath’s best-known poems (‘perhaps the greatest of her generation’) were ‘rejected by literary editors as “too extreme” ’. Is it possible that one of those editors now has something to do with the LRB?
Richard Jacobs
London SE14
Karl Miller writes: When I was literary editor of the New Statesman, I was in the habit of publishing verse and prose by Sylvia Plath, and I came to know her a bit. When a selection of her last poems was sent, my first response was to consider her state of mind and to make enquiries. I was afraid she might take her life. Such is the tormented state of Plath studies that it is only to be expected that this response, and the delays and uncertainties to which it may have led, should sometimes appear to be spoken of as part of a process of flat rejection.
