Category Sylvia Plath

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‘I want my career, my children and a free supple life’: Sylvia Plath’s radical reinvention

Too often framed as a tragic icon or a victim of domesticity, the poet remade herself and her work at the start of the 60s, as a new collection will show

In February 1962, Sylvia Plath dropped in on her neighbour in Devon, Rose Key, with “a plate of absolutely indigestible Black Walnut-flavored cupcakes”. She had made them from a Betty Crocker mix palmed off on her by the bank manager’s wife. Not wanting to waste it nor feed it to her own family (she was scornful of both processed food and the British appetite for starch), Plath baked it and efficiently dispatched it next door.

There was a lot of cake-baking involved in the social life of North Tawton. Plath excelled at it – like everything else. In the early months of that year, shortly after giving birth to her second child, she was not only making her own “six-egg” sponges, she was taking Italian, German and French lessons, writing an experimental poem for the BBC Third programme (Three Women), obsessively sourcing rugs for her new house (“I have looked & looked at carpets, in Exeter, London & Plymouth, & feel now that our choice is right & sensible”), having the downstairs floors cemented (she hated dirty floors) and expressing a desire to begin woodwork classes.

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From Dylan Thomas’ shopping list to a note from Sylvia Plath’s doctor: newly uncovered case files reveal the hidden lives of famous writers

Exclusive: Hardship grant applications to the Royal Literary Fund, including unseen letters by Doris Lessing and a note from James Joyce saying that he ‘gets nothing in the way of royalties’, show authors at their most vulnerable

Tobacco, swiss roll, Irish whiskey, Guinness and monkey nuts: that’s the diet followed by one of the foremost poets of the 20th century.

Dylan Thomas’ grocery bill is among a trove of famous writers’ personal documents and letters – many of which are as yet unseen by the public, and have been exclusively shown to the Guardian – discovered in the case files of a literary charity.

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‘Ambition is a punishing sphere for women’: author Maggie Nelson on why Taylor Swift is the Sylvia Plath of her generation

What do Swift and Plath have in common, and should Kamala Harris have spoken out about her political ambitions? The Argonauts author turns her lens on poetry, pop and patriarchy

Maggie Nelson is an unapologetic Taylor Swift fan. She knows the discography, drops song lyrics into conversation and tells me she took her family to the Vancouver leg of the Eras tour. So she’s a dyed-in-the-wool Swiftie? Nelson seems not entirely comfortable with the breathless connotations of that term but yes, the love is real. So much so, she has written a book about the billionaire singer-songwriter, or rather, a joint analysis of Swift and Sylvia Plath, who recurs in much of Nelson’s oeuvre.

The notion of uniting these two cultural titans, who are seemingly poles apart in sensibility – one a melancholic American poet, the other an all-American poster girl – came to her when she heard Swift’s 2024 album, The Tortured Poets Department. Alongside its literary references to F Scott Fitzgerald, Dylan Thomas and Shakespeare, there are heavy resonances of Plath in its introspection and emotional tumult. But the book only started to take shape after a chat with her 13-year-old son’s friend, Alba. “We were making bracelets and she said ‘Have you ever heard of Sylvia Plath?’ I thought that was funny because I’d written my undergraduate thesis on Plath and I was [almost] 40 years older than her. So I said: ‘I have heard of Sylvia Plath.’ As I sat there, I thought, these kids don’t want to hear me talk on this topic but I have a lot to say because I’ve been thinking of it all.”

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