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“... only book known to me to give a straightforward account of American poetry from Anne Bradstreet to Sylvia Plath; and as such it will be welcome to many. It has not room to ask the difficult questions, and without any undue hospitality to nonentities it accepts the corpus of American verse pretty well at current valuation. But it is ...”

“... as a poet. This gets one into murky waters. If you could go back and slip a few Prozac to Sylvia Plath, knowing that by so doing you would unwrite those final poems, but save her life, what would you do? Conversely, would one wish further unhappiness on Arnold, so that we might have more poems like ‘The Buried Life’? The most stimulating and ...”

“... out of academic jobs or film deals as well as writing poetry. They were celebrities of a kind. Sylvia Plath became a celebrity, and has remained one. Elizabeth Jennings, like her grandmother, seemed somehow stalled, living and working where the limelight did not reach. How did she survive? She had no family to provide for, but her life, I suspect, was ...”

“... of fantasy – ‘perverse, recalcitrant, persistent’, as she describes it in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. In that study, she suggests that women are more likely to articulate this power. In Rose’s novel Albertine knows how to withdraw into the poisoned autonomy of fantasy, but Marcel is still more dependent on its seductive illusions. Neither is ...”

“... best titles are gone. Turgenev has long since taken the solid and serious Fathers and Sons, and Sylvia Plath, the seminal ‘Daddy’. Germaine Greer’s used up Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, and now Blake Morrison has bagged And When Did You Last See Your Father? Which leaves me, I guess, with a choice between Oh, mein Papa and Daddy’s Little ...”

“... to have children. In piece after piece, as if people were anticipating the, to me, oversold Sylvia Plath, there is rebellion in the ranks: go ahead if you want to, but resist the union of motherhood, which is often fuelled by a large dose of resentment at the freedom of the childless woman. The nuclear missile and toxic waste problems have made the ...”

“... the individual lyric) were rigorous and concise. It would be easy enough to claim her, along with Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich, as one of the most important women writing poetry in English in the decades after the Second World War, if ‘woman poet’ hadn’t been a category Levertov despised. ‘Among Jews a Goy, among Gentiles … a Jew or at least ...”

“... of Sappho’s suicidal leap of despair, to the all-too-well recorded and non-fictional deaths of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. The middle ground between 17th and 20th-century examples of disappointment and morbidity is largely filled in by a long, long chapter on L.E.L. – Letitia Elizabeth Landon. The length of this chapter urges it to become a ...”

“... step not only with the likes of Larkin and Amis, but with the alternatives on offer: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the American ‘confessional’ poets. Finding himself at odds with the poetic values he opposed and with those he had helped to articulate, he might have been expected either to abandon Britain and British poetry, or to devote himself to ...”

“... as inside Jay’s mind. This is a first novel, and too much indebted to a tradition, going back to Sylvia Plath and Salinger, of writing from inside a character, especially an insecure one, with a determined brightness. ‘Dear Dad, I don’t know who I am. I seem to be whoever I am with. Did you ever have that feeling? Love, Jay.’ When, as a child, he ...”

“... accounts of breakdowns, looking for ‘allies’; and compares herself to Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Margery Kempe, William Styron. Significantly, the book she finds most helpful is The Words to Say It by Marie Cardinal, an account of her breakdown which Cardinal has since admitted to making up. It doesn’t ...”

“... examination of being an abandoned daughter is at its most intense here: Keegan joins E. Nesbit and Sylvia Plath in clinching on the cry ‘Daddy!’ A small girl, daughter of a struggling farmer, is sent to a better-off couple to be looked after while her mother has – yet another – baby; her father deposits her without saying when he will come ...”

“... much as Janet Malcolm, in The Silent Woman (1994), turned the tables on biographers of Sylvia Plath by intruding on their domestic lives. According to Shapiro, mainstream Shakespeare scholars have collectively ignored the authorship controversy because it is their evil twin: ‘The more that Shakespeare scholars encourage autobiographical ...”

“... Despite the photographs and the smattering of famous names – encounters with Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Assia Wevill, George Barker and Elizabeth Smart are described, sometimes with an almost embarrassing degree of openness – it takes an effort of will to remember that what is described actually happened. This odd effect makes more sense if you ...”

“... simultaneously discovering, testing and tasting what hurts both of them, and if they sound like Sylvia Plath, that’s because Plath took Lawrence’s vengeful intuitions as a model when she probed the weak spots in her own family. Even the most rapturous moments of ‘now’ are inseparable from the ...”