The life-and-death cycles at the heart of Sylvia Plath's work
In 1971, eight years after Sylvia Plath's death, her husband Ted Hughes publicly disputed poet-critic Al Alvarez's claim in a book that Plath's suicide was a "cry for help that fatally misfired," demanding the passage be removed; the publishers refused. Scholars still debate whether Plath intended to die, and newly available material — some unpublished, some from new Yale Beinecke Library archives — shows that from her teenage years onward, in her juvenilia, short fiction, poetry and The Bell Jar, Plath framed death as an opportunity for rebirth. Plath has had a resurgent year: Billie Eilish will make her acting debut as Esther in The Bell Jar, and three unseen Plath drawings went on sale at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair for $250,000.
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