Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (Literary Lives) [Hardcover]

Linda Wagner-Martin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 14, 1999 | Series: Literary Lives

By examining the works and life of Sylvia Plath, Linda Wagner-Martin achieves to make the story of her growth into a consummate artist both dramatic and convincing. In her narrative of the accomplished, yet tentative American girl, Wagner-Martin brings the desire to become a writer to the center of Plath's life. By this, she humanizes Plath and brings her from the status of myth and legend to the normality of a talented woman who guides her life by her continuous attempts to achieve her literary aims.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Feminist icon and patron saint of moody coffeehouse poets, Sylvia Plath has been so overexposed that it is hard to see her with fresh eyes. This book, part of a useful series that focuses on writers' working lives, builds on such works as Jacqueline Rose's The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Harvard Univ., 1992) to remind readers that, Plath's well-known personal suffering notwithstanding, "to read autobiographically...is to dismiss the artistry Plath demands of her writing, and often achieves in it." Thus, this study marks less a paradigm shift in Plath studies than a cutting away of the inessential and a consolidation of the best that is known. Collections that already have a substantial number of Plath studies, including Wagner-Martin's own Sylvia Plath: A Biography (1987), may not wish to add yet another item to an already groaning shelf, but readers who are familiar with Plath's writing and want to know more about its personal and professional contexts would do well to begin with this succinct, commonsensical study.ADavid Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"...this study is well judged and well written, offering insights into Plath's work as it speaks of her family relationships..." --Years Work in English Studies

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 184 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; First Edition edition (August 14, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312223234
• ISBN-13: 978-0312223236
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,036,912 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #69 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( P ) > Plath, Sylvia

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A concise view of Plath in her time, October 13, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (Literary Lives) (Hardcover)

This book is an excellent look at what Plath wrote, her beginnings as a writer, the climates that she worked in and how her relations with her mother and her husband helped to shape her writing. While I would have liked to see more of how Plath's favorite authors influenced her, there is enough new material (letter and journal excerpts, as well as the author's observations) to make it a worthwhile addition to the ever-growing pile of books on the legendary Sylvia Plath. A good study for beginners and scholars alike.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Writing and Reading Life, December 19, 2009

By 

Peter K. Steinberg "pksteinberg" (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (Literary Lives) (Paperback)

Having read so much drivel about Plath this year, I decided to turn back the clock a bit...

Linda Wagner Martin's Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (Macmillan Press, 1999; 2nd. ed. rev. and expanded, 2003) is a gem. What struck me in 1999 when it first came out was the fact that it discussed unpublished materials, be they letters, poems, prose, or other. Discouraged by the number of mediocre books I've read recently about Plath (particularly poems about Plath), I thought I'd give a critical work a read, just to reestablish a connection with good writing about Plath. A good critic can convince the reader that their approach to the subject is the right way, despite any amount of knowledge one may possess about the said subject. Wagner-Martin does this. In the Preface, she states that Plath's life was "genuinely a literary life. There was no other aim for Sylvia Plath..." It is with this in mind that Wagner-Martin writes one of the best critical books on Plath.

The themes in Plath's poetry and prose that Wagner-Martin examines include "Plath's Hospital Writing", "Plath's Poems about Women", as well as "Recalling the Bell Jar" and "Lifting the Bell Jar", amongst others. Each chapter is clearly written and easy to read, full of wonderful, original analysis and shows the constant connections and a continual narrative, in Plath's body of work. Wagner-Martin draws much of her information and analysis from her own experience in working on Plath, as well as the working papers for her 1987 biography, and includes interview transcriptions and correspondence with Plath's friends and family members. It shows the value of good archival research, looking at drafts of poems and their deleted or otherwise unused lines and unfinished ideas.

Wagner-Martin writes, "We care about Sylvia Plath because of her poems, and her progress toward her last poems is one of modern literature's most exciting narratives." A finer way to express why we read Plath and why her poetry and prose matters cannot be stated. By examing Plath's earlier writing, and considering some of the writers she was reading, Wagner-Martin's claim that "Sylvia Plath trained all her life for her art" is easily supported.

The second, revised and expanded edition, published in 2003, includes a thirteenth chapter that looks particularly at Birthday Letters. Wagner-Martin explains that the first edition was already in production when Birthday Letters was published, making it impossible to add commentary about it at that time. While given just cursory criticism and examining just a few poems, the chapter takes a little bit away from the books focus: Plath's literary life. This is unintentional, especially given Wagner-Martin's criticism of Hughes having published the collection in a fashion that she feels usurps "the authority of Plath's narrative" and "literally [takes] the words out of Plath's mouth."

Wagner-Martin closes the second edition with what I consider to be a challenge to Plath's Estate and her readers. She says that, as a major poet, Plath "deserves to be swept along in a steady stream of appreciative criticism, scholarly accuracy and newly loyal readers." I couldn't agree more. Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life is a valuable contribution to Plath scholarship by an ardent scholar and admirer of the poet.