“... the kind of memory box ineradicably associated with Joseph Cornell: in this case, Ocean Library, Sylvia Plath ‘The Bell Jar’ (1991), which scatters the pages of Plath’s novel within the box’s interior; or how formally inventive we should consider Horn’s group of body fans, given the dazzling memory of ...”

“... lower and horizons diminished. There were, and still are, alternatives to Larkin. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Tony Harrison are powerfully present in these books, as are a number of the poets Motion and Morrison published in Contemporary British Poetry: Douglas Dunn, Anne Stevenson, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Andrew Motion, Derek ...”

“... the eventual book’s royalties. Scarcely less scandalous is the organ-grinder’s-monkey life of Sylvia Plath that her estate belatedly allowed into print. Hamilton’s last chapter merges into issues raised by last month’s Sunday papers. The Observer – with huge fanfare and expense – bought serialisation rights to Philip Larkin’s letters. These ...”

“... little lives that linger on into tetchy, dismal old age don’t have. Just a question, but what if Sylvia Plath were alive and well, along with Anne Sexton, and the two of them met over occasional lunches to tut-tut over the sloppy rearing of their grandchildren? Death, in any case, has a cachet which lends weight to even the featheriest of lives. A cynic ...”

“... afterwards be washed with boiling water and plenty of washing soda.’) One thinks immediately of Sylvia Plath in her small kitchen, one floor up in Primrose Hill. The last time her husband saw her there, he said, she was ‘upset and crying … tidying the place up’. By the 1980s, our house was full of stuff. Coats in the cupboards, toys in the ...”

“... the expunging of what I had taken to be just such an immersing in the deconstructive element: Sylvia Plath ‘was, to use Henry James’s well-worn phrase, immersing herself in the destructive element’. I’m afraid this now reads banally ‘Joseph Conrad’s’.) The Oxford memory is this: ‘The highest academic compliment I received as an ...”

“... Her subjects have changed too: the wives are more contemporary and productive (Elizabeth Hardwick, Sylvia Plath). And the text grows more polemical, as when she tells us: It drives me absolutely bonkers that the mythology of Zelda, as endlessly repeated by Scott’s biographers … dictates some narrative that she was not disciplined enough, and that is ...”

“... of highest achievement’ – Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf – did not have children. Sylvia Plath did, and look how that turned out. And for all ‘the endless sanctimony about how important it is’, Kipnis writes, child-raising ‘is not … a socially valued activity’ – an inconvenient truth reflected in the books girls read growing ...”

“... intensity of aspiration will be familiar to readers of biographies of Rich’s contemporaries – Sylvia Plath, say, or Susan Sontag or Helen Frankenthaler. But the cascade of good fortune that poured down on the ambitious young Adrienne unsettles even her biographer: ‘Had she asked a judge or committee for the moon in those days, who knows but she ...”

“... frock in fiction is often seen in mid-air, being thrown from the roof of a New York hotel in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar or drifting, sometimes on fire, through the fables of Angela Carter. Meanwhile, back in the 1920s on the morning of her party, Clarissa Dalloway is mending a tear in her green dress. It is a favourite dress. It would be ...”

“... vision, only a loved man tearing babies from their mothers’ arms. Perhaps Rebecca was reading Sylvia Plath (‘Every woman adores a Fascist’) while Pinter was reading Gita Sereny. At the end of the play Rebecca seems to become one of the women whose babies are being taken away. She says she wrapped her child in a shawl, gave it to a man. Later a ...”

“... and after a while feverish hunt through Australia, New Mexico, Mexico, Italy and France for what Sylvia Plath called ‘a country as far away as health’. Ellis has scrupulously accumulated a host of fascinating details illuminating every facet of the writer’s life, from his eating (and cooking) habits to his writing practices, from his infamous ...”

“... none of the planetary collisions, the cheek-chewing grand guignol of the legend of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. There are no treaties with dark gods to be unpacked into conspiracy files and no shamanic visitations from crows and reeking foxes. Two ambitious young or youngish American men operating out of the same city, San Francisco, forge an alliance of ...”

“... Nims pointed out that you can view the durable iambics of English speech in the poetry of Sylvia Plath, as you can see the reef below you if you move over it in a glass-bottomed boat. Yet Plath seldom assumes the regularities of absolute metre. Auden’s and Fenton’s poetry employs regular metre and rhyme on ...”

“... I said. “Housewife,” she said. “Writer,” I said. “I’ll just put down housewife.”’ Sylvia Plath was impressed by Jackson’s second novel, Hangsaman (1951), which charts a young woman’s mental deterioration: she asked to meet Jackson, Linda Wagner-Martin relates in her 1987 biography of Plath, when she ...”