Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation By Emily Van Duyne

This impassioned reassessment of Sylvia Plath’s life and work blends feminist theory and biography to challenge various narratives that have dominated criticism of the poet since her suicide, in 1963. One focus is Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, whom Plath accused of violence; for decades following her death, Van Duyne argues, Hughes shaped Plath’s legacy in an effort to obscure this history. Many of Hughes’s misdeeds (burning Plath’s journals, altering the manuscript of “Ariel”) are well-trod territory, but Van Duyne’s approach, in which she shows how certain publishers, critics, and biographers helped maintain some version of Hughes’s account, feels fresh and vital.