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The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath

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Anita Helle's The Unraveling Archive: essays on Sylvia Plath is a very welcome and long-awaited addition to Plath scholarship. The eleven literary critical essays examine Plath's work and life and are connected through each author's experience using Plath's archives.

The books two sections divide the essays into the following themes: The Plath Archive and Culture and the Politics of Memory. Plath's archives are divided between the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington, and the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College. The essays in this section concern themselves with "newly published, underutilized, and underrepresented material." (8) Tracy Brain, Robin Peel, Kathleen Connors, and Kate Moses examine various aspects of the Plath archive. Brain discusses Plath's Ariel manuscripts and the recent publication of Ariel: The restored edition. Peel continues to draw out Plath's interest in politics, following his 2002 monograph Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War politics in his survey of Plath's political education. Kathleen Connors, mastermind behind the 2002 exhibition Eye Rhymes and co-editor of a forthcoming book under the same title, discusses the riches of Plath's visual works, a skill which was highly developed at an early age. Moses draws on the audio recordings of Plath's voice in a variety of poetry readings and interviews conducted from 1958 through early 1963.

The essays in the second part, Culture and the Politics of Memory, "reflects the opening up of critical approaches to Plath and also the explosion of the canon." These essays explore "works that have received less critical attention" but also drawn on the "heightened awareness of the contexts and settings that have mediated our understanding of Plath's multiple identities." (8) Essays by Sandra Gilbert, Ann Keniston, Janet Badia, Anita Helle, Marsha Bryant, Lynda K. Bundtzen, and Diane Middlebrook each present valuable insight and opinion on Plath's work and help to continue a re-evaluation of critical reception.

The publication of this book, on the radar for about a year, it is well-received like a delayed plane finally reaching its destination. Two enthusiastic thumbs up; my only regret is that I don't have more thumbs...