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“... Ten days after I was, you were born. Heading out past sixty, I’m still hanging on But you baled out at thirty, telling the world ‘Dying is an art. I do it exceptionally well.’ Now you’re a young poet of deserved fame, I An ageing one of modest reputation. From where I sit, cool Daddy looks at you. He sees the pain, and the brat – and the brat in pain ...”

“... In memory of Sandra LahireHow not to write a biography of Sylvia Plath? We might put the question another way. What is the relationship for a poet between writing a mind and writing a life? Does self-revelation (or confession, a label often used to describe the work of Plath and her contemporary Anne Sexton) lead us, not just into the inner recesses of the poet’s thought, but through the veils, behind the closed doors of her past? Do we enter the room, see the knife slit the finger, catch the raised voices, watch the vase shatter, hear the baby cry? Plath’s language is sensuous, evocative enough to bring all this, and a great deal more, to life ...”

“... Penguin Contemporary American Poetry exactly a month before she killed herself early in 1963, Sylvia Plath praised ‘the inwardness of these images ... the uncanny faculty of melting through the leaves of the wallpaper, through the dark looking-glass, into a world which one can only call surrealist and irrational’. It was a process she could see ...”

“... the dramatic personalities behind the voices in recent poetry: Lowell, Berryman, Sexton, Ginsberg, Plath, Hughes, et al. Even in Larkin there exists a strong, identifiable persona, no matter how recessive the tone.’ In Gunn, this was deliberate. In an interview he said: People do have difficulty with my poetry, difficulties in locating the central voice or ...”

“... of North Carolina, was bewildered by the hostile reception in Britain of her biography of Sylvia Plath, published in 1987. Not only had she run into major conflicts with the Plath estate, she explains in her preface to Telling Women’s Lives, but some critics saw her as both an ‘unethical commercial ...”

“... by his role as her betrayer, her survivor. She has become his phantom limb. The story of Sylvia Plath, according to Jacqueline Rose, seems ‘effortlessly to transmute itself into soap opera’. As Rose demonstrates in her ambitious and original book, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, ...”

“... much attention, but the publication in the New Yorker last August of Janet Malcolm’s study of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes was an exception. Brilliantly packaged with reprints of the Plath poems which the New Yorker had originally published, the issue was a sell-out on both sides of the Atlantic, and for weeks no ...”

“... Sylvia Plath​ was scared of letters. The postman always announced his presence with a ‘burst of prophetic whistling’. In May 1958, eating a slice of toast with butter and strawberry jam before going to teach her class at Smith, she spotted the mailman with ‘a handful of flannel: circulars – soap-coupons, Sears sales, a letter from mother of stale news she’d already relayed over the phone, a card from Oscar Williams inviting us to a cocktail party in New York on the impossible last day of my classes ...”

“... could be found, even from the oblique standpoint of Edinburgh. A more obvious comparison is with Sylvia Plath, virtually the patent-holder for our time of poetry as theatre, as ‘emotional drama’. With her, too, the plot of the drama, its theme (Oedipal to be sure, but how?), remains, satisfyingly for enthusiasts, unclear. But out of the ...”

“... of the century are Virginia Woolf, Edna St Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, H.D. and Sylvia Plath. The Harlem Renaissance novelists, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston, have a collective chapter as well; and elsewhere the authors manage to work in a reference to nearly every famous, fleeting, highbrow or popular woman ...”

“... stuck in a loony bin with a contingent of bulging old biddies.There are times when one thinks of Sylvia Plath – fellow contest-winner and bathing beauty, vivid diarist, world conqueror – without the breakdowns. Millay lived to enjoy her success; Plath didn’t. But then the breakdown came anyway, as it does in ...”

“... in its approach, often equally brilliant in its aperçus. Both authors discuss the case of Sylvia Plath, who for Hawthorn had the problem that being a woman – personified in the heroine of The Bell Jar – ‘she is not granted the luxury of a double life.’ But Madame Bovary has one – indeed, three lives and more. ...”

“... lurid Prick Up Your Ears T-shirt. The most intricate and poignant of Newman’s examples is Sylvia Plath. The Bell Jar is permeated with frock consciousness. The protagonist, Esther Greenwood, who has come to New York to a dream job on Mademoiselle magazine, ends by throwing her clothes away: ‘A strapless elasticised slip which, in the course of ...”

“... inexperienced or blinkered readers the existence and nature of a female literary tradition. Sylvia Plath’s best late poetry often has the voice of the rebellious madwoman confidently escaped from her attic. Professor Uroff avoids simple equations between the life and the work, and is not interested in the partisanship of polemical biography: it ...”

“... for the sensational, in sentences that lack a main verb: ‘Then a row, an explosion of anger. Sylvia, a trapped animal, brought fresh from the shining shore of the New World and confined in Yorkshire cold, Yorkshire grime, Yorkshire ways she does not really understand.’ How could a book written in this way, I frequently found myself wondering, be the ...”