How to use this Page

This post is part of a series on the blog where I share some of the nuggets of wisdom and inspiration — related to writing and/or life — that I find steeped in the pages of novels that I’ve read.

This is a book I found at my public library. It’s been on my radar for awhile and I was happy when I saw it on the shelf. Ironically, I had just re-read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath the week before so maybe it was kismet since this book revolves around this author.

This novel centers around several teens who are all going through their unique traumas. This particular line spoke to me because we have all been through some type of trial or trauma ourselves and sometimes we just want it to be over — but sometimes you just have to go through whatever it is that has hurt you before you can move on.

From Jam, the narrator of the novel Belzhar by Meg Wolitzer

“I hadn’t known that if you hold on, if you force yourself as hard as you can to find some kind of patience in the middle of all your impatience, things can change. It’s big, and it’s always incredibly messy. But there’s no way around the mess.”

"The Original Gone Girl: On Daphne Du Maurier and Her Rebecca”
"The Gothic Life and Times of Horace Walpole"
"The Plath Resolution"

Otherwise most of the year was just book book book fakakta book, but I loved getting to write these.

I wish Janet Malcolm would have to add an appendix to Silent Woman for every new installment of Hughes and Plath biography mess.* This latest bit reminded me that it is LESS THAN TEN YEARS until the trunk gets opened in Ted Hughes’ archive at Emory, the one that he packed himself that’s locked off until 2023, and how much I sincerely hope that I’m not struck down before that happens because I have SO MANY THEORIES about what is in there.** After that you can put me on an ice floe and send me off. (Also think one of the two lost Plath journal notebooks is going to show up some time in the next decade—either in that trunk or from some Assia Wevill relative or if the house in Devon is ever fully unpacked. And then everyone’s going to have to REWRITE everything.)

Related: Was thinking last night about biography and how brutal it can be in its assessments. Someone was described this way in the one I’m reading: “Often dressed in yellow, her favorite color, Rose was soon known as a passable if gloomy poet and indifferent author of short stories…” Her husband: “George, a conventional and reasonably prolific author, was known as a drunk.” It really makes you lie in bed and stare at the ceiling for a while.

* Anne Stevenson in her study, tapping out a long consoling email to Jonathan Bate.
** If it turns out to just be some elaborate astrological charts and Leonard Baskin doodles and Shakespeare genealogies, how disappointing—and funny.

By Philip Carter

Today, 11 February 2013, marks the 50th anniversary of the death of the poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). It is an event that has significantly shaped biographies and critical studies of her work — particularly following the publication of Ariel (1965), her posthumous collection edited and prepared by Ted Hughes. Then, as now, many reviewers regarded these poems as foretelling the circumstances of her death. Plath’s biography in the Oxford DNB offers an alternative perspective. As its authors Sally Brown and Clare Taylor write:

‘Such criticism helped to perpetuate the idea that [Plath’s] death was the most famous thing about her, and encouraged further critics to read the poems as solely charting her increasing mental agitation. But even a cursory reading of the poems reveals the many voices of her work—the amused, hopeful, triumphant, as well as the enraged and vitriolic—and Plath herself, when talking about her work, was amusing and charming, her voice controlled, guttural, and powerful. … A writer and a mother, Plath provided a model for a new generation of poets of the consciousness-raising movement, and she remains enormously popular especially with young female readers. Her lasting triumph will be the power and precision of her poetic voice, and her vision of new possibilities for women writers.’

In addition to Plath’s life in the Oxford DNB, an edited audio version of her biography is also available.

[See post to listen to audio]

Or download the podcast directly.

Philip Carter is Publication Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Read more about Sylvia Plath on the Oxford DNB website. The Oxford DNB online is freely available via public libraries across the UK. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ allowing members to log-on to the complete dictionary, for free, from home (or any other computer) twenty-four hours a day. In addition to 58,500 life stories, the ODNB offers a free, twice monthly biography podcast with over 175 life stories now available. You can also sign up for Life of the Day, a topical biography delivered to your inbox, or follow @odnb on Twitter for people in the news.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: By Jprw [Creative Commons] via Wikimedia Commons 

The post On this day: the 50th anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s death appeared first on OUPblog.

When the UK publisher Faber released the cover art for a 50th anniversary edition of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, online critics attacked the controversial cover image.

Below, we’ve collected parody book covers inspired by the updated cover, including A Hunger Games-themed cover, go-go dancers and clowns. What is your favorite?

The London Review of Books wrote about the controversy:

The first edition of The Bell Jar to appear under Sylvia Plath’s name was published by Faber in 1967, with a cover designed by Shirley Tucker. This month Faber have brought out a 50th anniversary edition of the novel (it was first published by Heinemann in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas), with a cover about as far from Tucker’s Bridget Rileyish concentric circles as you can get: a stock photo from the 1950s of a woman with a powder compact. As Dustin Kurtz, a marketing manager at Melville House, tweeted, “How is this cover anything but a ‘f*** you’ to women everywhere?”

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Yikes! Sylvia Plath’s infamous (and only) novel, THE BELL JAR, received a 50th Anniversary makeover and it’s not making people happy. Apparently the publisher tried to make it more appealing to women’s fiction fans. Get ready for an uprising on the internet. This is certainly going to spark a dialogue.

It should not be so hard to write both poetry and fiction. Both arts, after all, make use of the same materials, words and punctuation. Poems frequently utilize the strategies of fiction, which in turn, in the hands of the best writers, listens carefully to the sounds that it is making. Even poems which do [...]

Faber & Faber, the storied publisher that published T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, James Joyce, Tom Stoppard and Sylvia Plath, now offers online writing creative courses.

The publisher launched Faber Academy Online, a 28-week course that costs £2800 (about $4,400). The publisher first offered writing courses in 2008. What do you think–should publishers offer creative writing classes?

Here’s more from the release: “Chatrooms, topic forums and specially commissioned video content from Faber editors will be combined with one-to-one Skype feedback and podcasts to create a unique learning experience … The first offering to run on the new platform will be Writing A Novel, a 28-week programme based on the face-to-face course of the same name that has already brought huge success for the writers S. J. Watson and Rachel Joyce.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Ted Hughes once wrote a letter to his sister about Sylvia Plath’s “good fortune” in selling “a long rather bad poem to The Atlantic Monthly, which is one of the Mags in America.”

We began class by listening to Sylvia Plath and Etheridge Knight read their work—tape recordings from years ago played out loud to a quiet room so that we might understand long lines, short lines, loud inside soft, the daring image inside the purposefully mundane, the right repetition, the empowered list.  We had listened to that, and then we had read out loud.  We had dreamed about our memoirs, closed with lines from Lia Purpura, packed our things; we were almost gone.  Except that B was still there, his laptop open.  You were speaking of poetry, he said.  You should hear this. 

I have watched and listened to this three times now.  I share it with you.  A former Penn student in a scream sing from the very top, as he says, of his fingertips, while President Obama looks admiringly on.

Remarkable.

Thank you, B.

Flavorpill has collected the doodles of famous authors, including Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace, Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Allen Ginsberg, Mark Twain, Henry Miller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jorge Luis Borges.

The drawings ranged from insect portraits to nightmare images. Wallace drew one of the funnier pieces, doodling glasses and fangs on a photo of Cormac McCarthy.

Vonnegut (pictured with his artwork, via) incorporated many of his drawings into his books. He even had his own art gallery exhibitions. What author should illustrate their next book?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A newly released poem written by Ted Hughes directly addresses the writer’s reaction to the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath.

After securing permission from Hughes’ widow Carol, The New Statesman published the piece entitled Last Letter. British actor Jonathan Pryce reads from the poem in the BBC video embedded above.

Normally, Hughes’ process to “complete” the writing of a poem was to type the finalized version. Several draft versions of Last Letter were found in Hughes’ handwritten notebooks. The earliest draft of the poem is contained in a blue exercise book now owned by the British Library’s Ted Hughes archive.
continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

My friend Reiko, knowing that I had lately received what can only be described as the rudest rejection letter ever (a rejection apparently based not on my work but on this editor's estimation of my career), sent along a link entitled "30 famous authors whose works were rejected (repeatedly, and sometimes rudely) by publishers."

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not famous (which was this recent editor's accusation against me). But I do take solace (and shouldn't we all?) from reviewing again (for we've reviewed them in the past) these bits and pieces from the annals of whoops.

"We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell."

— from one of many publishers rejecting Stephen King's Carrie

"It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA."

—from the editor dismissing George Orwell's Animal Farm

"There certainly isn't enough genuine talent for us to take notice."

— a publisher assessing the poetry of Sylvia Plath

And my personal favorite:

"I'm sorry Mr. Kipling, but you just don't know how to use the English language."

— a San Francisco Examiner editor rejecting a Kipling short story

Everyone, of course, has his or her right to his or her opinion, and editors can only buy those books with which they are in love. I'm simply not altogether convinced that cruelty need enter the scene.