Letters Home

Letters Home
Author: Sylvia Plath
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Total Pages: 751
Release: 2011-02-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0571266347

Letters Home represents Sylvia Plath's correspondence from her time at Smith College in the early 1950s, through her meeting with, and subsequent marriage to, the poet Ted Hughes, up to her death in February 1963. The letters are addressed mainly to her mother, with whom she had an extremely close and confiding relationship, but there are also some to her brother Warren and her benefactress Mrs Prouty. Plath's energy, enthusiasm and her passionate tackling of life burst onto these pages, providing us with a vivid and intimate portrait of a woman who has come to be regarded as one of the greatest of twentieth-century poets. In addition to her capacity for domestic and writerly happiness, however, these letters also hint at Plath's potential for deep despair, which reached its crisis when she holed up in a London flat for the terrible winter of 1963.

North by Night

North by Night
Author: Katherine Ayres
Publisher: Yearling
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2013-03-27
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0307833976

It's 1851 and Lucy Spencer's family is keeping a secret. Their Ohio home is a station on the Underground Railroad, the network of people and places that helps fugitive slaves escape to freedom in Canada. Lucy believes in what she and her family do to help the fugitives, even if it means putting herself in danger. So Lucy doesn't hesitate when she is asked to stay with the Widow Aurelia Mercer and help her with a family of runaway slaves hiding in her attic. And she learns so much from her experience--about growing up, love, and standing on her own. But what will Lucy do when she is asked to make the ultimate sacrifice and leave all she loves behind?

Writers and Their Mothers

Writers and Their Mothers
Author: Dale Salwak
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2018-02-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3319683489

Ian McEwan, Margaret Drabble, Martin Amis, Rita Dove, Andrew Motion and Anthony Thwaite are among the twenty-two distinguished contributors of original essays to this landmark volume on the profound and frequently perplexing bond between writer and mother. In compelling detail they bring to life the thoughts, work, loves, friendships, passions and, above all, the influence of mothers upon their literary offspring from Shakespeare to the present. Many of the contributors evoke the ideal with fond and loving memories: understanding, selfless, spiritual, tender, protective, reassuring and self-assured mothers who created environments favorable to the development of their children’s gifts. At the opposite end of the parenting spectrum, however, we also see tortured mothers who ignored, interfered with, smothered or abandoned their children. Their early years were times of traumatic loss, unhappily dominated by death and human frailty. Elegantly assembled and presented, Writers and Their Mothers will appeal to everyone interested in biography, literature, and creativity in general.

The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath

The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath
Author: Anita Helle
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2022-03-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350119237

With chapters written by more than 25 leading and emerging international scholars, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath provides the most comprehensive collection of contemporary scholarship on Plath's work. Including new scholarly perspectives from feminist and gender studies, critical race studies, medical humanities and disability studies, this collection explores: · Plath's literary contexts – from the Classics and the long poem to W.B Yeats, Edith Sitwell, Ruth Sillitoe, Carol Ann Duffy, and Ted Hughes · New insights from Plath's previously unpublished letters and writings · Plath's broadcasting work for the BBC Providing new approaches to her life and work, this book is an indispensable volume for scholars of Sylvia Plath.

Write to Read

Write to Read
Author: Larry Swartz
Publisher: Pembroke Publishers Limited
Total Pages: 131
Release: 2022-09-19
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1551389606

This practical book is full of quick and easy-to-use lessons that promote meaningful writing practice. Teachers will find strategies organized alphabetically and in a consistent format that will inspire students to plan, develop, and share their writing. The lessons allow teachers to choose what they need to meet the diverse needs of students in grades one through eight. Each independent lesson guides students through the writing process with information about a writing form, along with suggested literature sources. Tips throughout the book will help students successfully write to narrate, to inform, to entertain, to persuade, to respond, and to enjoy.

Revising Life

Revising Life
Author: Susan R. Van Dyne
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2000-11-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0807866067

'Provides a compelling argument for Plath's revision of the painful parts of her life--the failed marriage, her anxiety for success, and her ambivalence towards her mother. . . . The reader will feel the tension in the poetry and the life.'Choice '[Examines] Plath's twin goals of becoming a famous poet and a perfect mother. . . . This book's main points are clearly and forcefully argued: that both poems and babies require 'struggle, pain, endless labor, and . . . fears of monstrous offspring' and that, in the end, Plath ran out of the resources necessary to produce both. Often maligned as a self-indulgent confessional poet, Plath is here retrieved as a passionate theorist.'--Library Journal Susan Van Dyne's reading of twenty-five of Sylvia Plath's Ariel poems considers three contexts: Plath's journal entries from 1957 to 1959 (especially as they reveal her conflicts over what it meant to be a middle-class wife and mother and an aspiring writer in 1950s America); the interpretive strategies of feminist theory; and Plath's multiple revisions of the poems.

Red Comet

Red Comet
Author: Heather Clark
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 1185
Release: 2021-09-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 030795126X

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • The highly anticipated biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art. “One of the most beautiful biographies I've ever read." —Glennon Doyle, author of #1 New York Times Bestseller, Untamed With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials, Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant Sylvia Plath, who had precocious poetic ambition and was an accomplished published writer even before she became a star at Smith College. Refusing to read Plath’s work as if her every act was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark considers the sociopolitical context as she thoroughly explores Plath’s world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her troubles with an unenlightened mental health industry; her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes; and much more. Clark’s clear-eyed portraits of Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath’s suicide promote a deeper understanding of her final days. Along with illuminating readings of the poems themselves, Clark’s meticulous, compassionate research brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women poets the world over.

The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1

The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1
Author: Sylvia Plath
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 1424
Release: 2017-10-17
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 006274044X

A major literary event: the first volume in the definitive, complete collection of the letters of Sylvia Plath—most never before seen. One of the most beloved poets of the modern age, Sylvia Plath continues to inspire and fascinate the literary world. While her renown as one of the twentieth century’s most influential poets is beyond dispute, Plath was also one of its most captivating correspondents. The Letters of Sylvia Plath is the breathtaking compendium of this prolific writer’s correspondence with more than 120 people, including family, friends, contemporaries, and colleagues. The Letters of Sylvia Plath includes her correspondence from her years at Smith, her summer editorial internship in New York City, her time at Cambridge, her experiences touring Europe, and the early days of her marriage to Ted Hughes in 1956. Most of the letters are previously unseen, including sixteen letters written by Plath to Hughes when they were apart after their honeymoon. This magnificent compendium also includes twenty-seven of Plath’s own elegant line drawings taken from the letters she sent to her friends and family, as well as twenty-two previously unpublished photographs. This remarkable, collected edition of Plath’s letters is a work of immense scholarship and care, presenting a comprehensive and historically accurate text of the known and extant letters that she wrote. Intimate and revealing, this masterful compilation offers fans and scholars generous and unprecedented insight into the life of one of our most significant poets.

Between the Sheets

Between the Sheets
Author: Lesley McDowell
Publisher: ABRAMS
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2012-02-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1468301411

The literary critic examines the love lives and career ambitions of some of the twentieth century’s greatest female authors—from Sylvia Plath to Anaïs Nin. Why did a gifted writer like Sylvia Plath stumble into a marriage that drove her to suicide? Why did Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) want to marry Ezra Pound when she was far more attracted to women? Why did Simone de Beauvoir pimp for Jean-Paul Sartre? In Between the Sheets, author and feminist scholar Lesley McDowell examines nine famously troubled literary romances to arrive at a provocative insight into the motivations of these and other great female writers. The list of the damages done in each of these sexual relationships is long, but each provokes the same question: would these women have become the writers they became without these relationships? Delving into their diaries, letters, and journals, McDowell examines the extent to which each woman was prepared to put artistic ambition before personal happiness, and how dependent on their male writing partners they felt themselves to be. “McDowell . . . has culled incredibly juicy details. With so many affairs and broken hearts, the most surprising thing may be that anything got written in the last 100 years.” —The New York Times Book Review

The Wisdom of the Ego

The Wisdom of the Ego
Author: George E. Vaillant
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 1998-07-21
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0674268067

One of America's preeminent psychiatrists draws on his famous Study of Adult Development to give us an exhilarating look at how the mind's defenses work. What we see as the mind's trickery, George Vaillant tells us, is actually healthy. What's more, it can reveal the mind at its most creative and mature, soothing and protecting us in the face of unbearable reality, managing the unmanageable, ordering disorder. And because creativity is so intrinsic to this alchemy of the ego, Vaillant mingles his studies of obscure lives with psychobiographies of famous artists and others--including Florence Nightingale, Sylvia Plath, Anna Freud, and Eugene O'Neill.