I found this book incredibly useful in so many different ways that I think it would provide interesting information for anyone seeking to learn more about Plath and her work, from high school students to graduate students to any curious reader. I liked the succinct biography at the beginning, and I learned much from the critical and descriptive commentary about Plath's poetry and fiction, arranged by chapters in chronological order. Most of all, I enjoyed Hall's witty and thorough review of all of the Plath biographies.

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.

This book is a terrific combination of Axelrod's interpretations and Plath's life. It does not rest only upon facts, but instead it does a beautiful job of twisting together her life, her writing and her psychological condition. If you love Plath and her writing, this is the book for you. It is intelligent and written for people who not only want to know more about the life of a very troubled and talented woman, but those who also love her poetry.

Renée Curry's White Women Writing White is an admirably well researched, independent, brave, and often brilliant and startling book. It will undoubtedly prove germinal (and controversial) in critical whiteness studies. It provides an absolutely new perspective on the poets Hilda Doolittle (H. D.), Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath. It draws attention, truly for the first time, to the racial signifiers in the texts of these three great poets. It treats whiteness as a marked characteristic in the same way as blackness and Asianness have traditionally functioned in mainstream American literature and culture. It repeatedly and convincingly locates racial meanings in passages that have never been read in that light before. This book transforms the landscape. It is the most significant new work on these poets in years.

While many people rave about this story I fail to see where it's brilliance is. I read it upon recommendation by a friend. And while I did enjoy the style in which it was written, overall this book left me feeling empty. I felt I had wasted my time. Mostly because I could not at all sympathize with the main character except in the most extreme of cicumstances, such as the shock therapy. Other than those few moments, I did not feel like she was subject to any unusually cruel acts or treatment. The majority of my disappointment came in the end. I felt there wasn't any kind of payoff, no real conclusion.

Maybe I was distracted by all the little notes my friend had written in the book. Maybe it's simply because I'm a guy (which I sincerely doubt.) Personally, I would much rather read Ms. Plath's poetry than trudge this this little volume again.

I give it two stars, for while I didn't necessarily enjoy the plot, the prose were downright hilarious at times!...

I am a 17 year old female and thought that "The Bell Jar" was an excellent book. Knowing that Sylvia Plath actually went through most of the book's events herself makes the story all the more moving. If only everyone could be as truthful as Esther Greenwood! This book is quite indescribable, so you must read it for yourself. However, if I had to compare it to another book, I would say Sanlinger's "The Catcher in the Rye." Esther Greenwood is like Holden Caulfield's female counterpart. If you couldn't stand Holden Caulfield though, don't let this stop you from reading "The Bell Jar." The raw emotions this book deals with are so real, it is almost scary to think what society can do to an individual. I read this book "for fun," not because I had to, and I suggest you do the same.

Before reading "The Bell Jar," I read "Ariel," Plath's collection of poems that really address the climax of her depression with such great poems like "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus." But it was only after I read "The Bell Jar," that I truly appreciated Plath's genius and sophistication as a writer. One of the reasons Plath was such a genius was her command of the English language. "The Bell Jar" does not read like a novel, but more like prose, which made the book a quick read.

"The Bell Jar" tells the story of Ester Greenwood, a young woman interning at a woman's magazine in New York City. The reader fully witnesses Ester's decent into depression and her institutionalization in a mental hospital. Like her poetry, "The Bell Jar" is semi - autobiographical and very emotional. Plath also leaves the ending of the novel ambiguous, I do not want to give the ending away but I will say this, do not expect any sort of resolution.

All in all, I would recommend this book to Plath fans and those who appreciate a clever, wonderfully written piece of literature.

Like The Hours, the recent prize-winning novel that both evoked and described author Virginia Wolff, this novel Wintering not only includes poet Sylva Plath as a character, it evokes her poetic voice and spirit. I admired the skillful way Kate Moses wove in bits of images that reflect the style of Plath's poetry and journals. While the story is written very much from Plath's point of view, the overall picture of her life it paints also honors many of the threads that Plath's husband Ted Hughes ran through his Birthday Letters poems. Interestingly enough, the novel accommodates both those who believe Plath was a victim and those who believe she was heroic.

This is likely to join The Hours as one of my all-time favorite novels. Initially I found the "jumping around" of the chapter settings in Wintering to be a bit off-putting, but I quickly settled down to be fully engaged by the quality of the writing and the intensity of the story. By the last page of Wintering, the outcome is inevitable and the emotional experience is full and complete, as it was in Plath's own version of Ariel and in The Hours as well as Wolff's Mrs. Dalloway.

Most readers who come to this book will already be familiar with the basic story of poet Sylvia Plath, her doomed marriage to author Ted Hughes, and her suicide at age thirty. In "Wintering," one of the Ariel poems, written in the four months before her death in February, 1963, Plath depicts the "real and bloody sacrifice" of this marriage, according to author Kate Moses, "not bodies piled in a mountain pass but her life...the truths fanning out a page at a time."

Kate Moses recreates the heart, soul, and psyche of Sylvia Plath in her extraordinary debut novel, Wintering. In preparation for this novel, Moses read virtually every piece of Plath's writing, and most, if not all, of the resource material about Plath. So completely has she distilled this material and incorporated it into the book that the reader feels as if s/he is actually entering the mind of Plath, a Plath who is speaking and reminiscing, conjuring up events, aching, dreaming, and hoping. Astonishingly, Moses achieves this without ever deviating from a third person narrative and without ever speaking as Plath herself.

Organizing the novel around the poems which make up the Ariel collection, all written in the last four months of Plath's life, Moses creates a fictional narrative using as chapter titles the names of poems from Ariel, each chapter including some of the imagery from these poems and the subject matter from Plath's life which parallels them. Moses does this naturally, without calling attention to this specific image in that poem, or this event at such and such a point in Plath's life, simply letting the narrative unfold in parallel with the essence and imagery of the poems, a process which feels, remarkably, as if it's unfolding of its own accord. The poems which serve as the impetus to each chapter live on after forty years, continuing to speak to the reader across time and space, and Moses wisely keeps her own narrative in the present tense, suiting her style to that of Plath's poetry. Like the poems, the chapters sieze on images and events in random order, making Moses's achievement in creating a real and memorable narrative out of the creative chaos truly daunting.

This not really a novel about Plath, so much as it is a novel in which Plath reveals herself, something she does to even greater effect in her poetry. Because of this, I would strongly urge the reader to find a copy of Plath's Ariel to read in concert with Moses's Wintering. Images from the poems take on added significance when they are repeated and expanded in Moses's narrative; likewise, events from the narrative shed light on some of the intense but sometimes unfocused feeling in the poems. When one knows about the lives of Plath and Ted Hughes and can see the significance in their lives of the repeating images of bees, apples, the moon, food, the earth, and life cycles, their symbolic importance in both the poems and narrative grows, and the reader gains new insights. This is a remarkable novel based on the life and poetry of Sylvia Plath, one which will undoubtedly bring new readers and new appreciation to Plath on the fortieth anniversary of her death at age thirty. Mary Whipple

But lock up the sharp knives first.
Read Wintering together with the poems its chapters are named for. First the chapter, then the poem (most, but not all, are in Ariel). This process will immerse you in the fierce genius and exquisite sensitivity of Sylvia Plath. In Wintering you can watch Sylvia watching Ted submit to the power of the poems she has hewn from his betrayal. Then read "The Courage of Shutting Up," in which Plath wrote: "..the tongue. Indefatigable, purple. Must it be cut out?
It has nine tails, it is dangerous.
And the noise it flays from the air, once it gets going!"

The journey is grueling, but accompanied by extraordinary beauty. Prepare to be broken and made whole again, more finely tuned.

The Journals of Sylvia Plath are an undisputible link to the base of her poetry. For a journal of a life, the entries are incredibly written and interesting. I have been very interested in her death by suicide which was the reason why I picked up these journals in the first place, but I found myself underlining sentences of her different viewpoints on life, ironically. If you you want to figure out about how Plath wrote her poetry and what events formed the woman who is such a mystery today, read this book. The only place where I thought that the diaries lacked was that all the information was not included. Some of her most passionate outrages and angry words have been taken out which I think are definitely a key to her poems that we do not possess. I am aware that the people in the journals must be protected but hope that the full works will be published in the future. The first half of the journals while Sylvia was in college have spoken to me and given me words and reasonings for my feelings that I had not been able to form myself before. I think any college student would benefit from reading her viewpoints and beautiful words. Anyone who is interested in the author will be impressed.

If you love Sylvia Plath's amazing poetry; if you have an affinity for either reading journals, or writing your own; or if you simply have an interest in the lifestyles and choices of women of some 50 years ago, these collected journals are a must.

Another reviewer wrote that this book was a big disappointment - that it stinks. How can one criticize someone's journals? I'm pretty sure Plath didn't expect these to be published one day - and so she didn't write them for the general public to read. These words are honest, riviting, disturbing, wonderful, priceless.

As the Journals host at BellaOnline, I first heard about this publication a year ago, and my interest was peaked. For years, I wondered, I speculated, what would happen to The Journals of Sylvia Plath once Ted Hughes passed away. For those familiar with the original publication of her journals, the foreward by Hughes (her estranged husband) mentioned that some of her journals which continued the story where the first published edition left off had been either "lost" or "destroyed" by him. Other parts of the journals had been edited. Now that he is no longer able to "hold back" the information, would their be a change to the content of the journals? Yes, but not in an important way.

The Unabridged Journals gives us the same vision of life as the original publication, but with more details included. No, the "lost" or "destroyed" journals have not resurfaced, and most of the details Hughes left out were details about him -- Plath's obsession with her husband, that is. Nothing horrible was left out, painting him as a monster. Instead, her fixation with her husband, embarassing tidbits about her desires for him, are what he had edited out. For die-hard Plath fans, such as myself, this is a nice edition to a collection with some very facinating tidbits. However, if you're just using the journals for a paper or report, the original edition will do just fine.

This long awaited document can be considered a text book for all who are interested in the life, work, and process of the writer Sylvia Plath. Karen Kukil's efforts to include every last detail of Plath's journals, including drawings and poem fragments, are incredibly well executed. The end result is a moving and informative book.

It's about time that we got the nearly full story of what she really thought and felt. Although we will probably never see those missing journals which were written months prior to her death, still what remains is riveting.

As for the person who mentioned how disturbing her entries are and how she comes across as a 'monster,' well, apparently some people have no appreciation for a) how complicated artistic people are; and b) how we ALL have these thoughts from time to time, whether we are artistic or not. We just don't take the time to write them down in journals for pedantic 'chicken soup' types to thoughtlessly analyze after we're dead.

I do however, agree with the intelligent comment about the Euripedean relationship with that mother. Good use of Greek mythology. I think it was Camille Paglia who pegged the real source of Plath's anger when she described the redoubtable Aurelia Plath as someone who could castrate you from fifty paces. Hilarious and true. Poor Sylvia. I would be [angry] too with a mother like that.

Thank you for these wonderful glimpses into the human condition. If Plath's a monster, then we all are.

Sylvia Plath's initial volume of poetry is very much in the formalistic style that was prevalent in the 1950s, but she brings to verse-making a "diction that is galvanized against inertia" (to quote Marianne Moore in a different context), a heavily alliterative, percussive idiom in which we discern kinship to Dylan Thomas and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

In "Hardcastle Crags," we have an analogue for a woman's heels against the pavement: "Flintlike, her feet struck / Such a racket of echoes." We have the slovenly slush of the tide at Point Shirley, where the poet's grandmother "kept house / Against what the sluttish, rutted sea could do." We have in other slant-rhymed terza-rima, and intricate stanza shapes reminiscent of Richard Wilbur and his lyric called "Beasts."

And has anyone captured the somnolent wakefulness of "the chilly no-man's-land of five o'clock in the morning" better than Sylvia Plath in "The Ghost's Leavetaking"?

There are poems about mushrooms, moles, and men in black. There is a homage to the artist Leonard Baskin, renowned as a maker of woodcuts. A keen visual sense in these poems leads us not to be surprised when we learn that Plath worked well as a painter of watercolours.

Her second pre-posthumous volume, "Ariel," is perhaps more famous for its unselfsparing chronicle of a crashing marriage and of suicidal depression. Its fiercely unfettered cadences and controversial images attracted immediate attention, praise and opprobrium. But this reviewer feels that the poems of "Colossus" represent the superior achievement, possessing a technique and a sonic command surpassed by precious few poets of our age.

"Hardcastle Crags" and "Point Shirley" are masterpieces. "Grantchester Meadows" shows a keen visual sense; "Man In Black," "Deer Island," and "Sow" display dexterity with slant-rhyme and terza rima. The poems are more formal than those found in "Ariel" and other posthumous books; but "The Colossus" does manage to remain quite vivid in the memory as a formidable achievement by a truly skilled poet, with a painterly eye, and an ear as good as any other midcentury poet.

poetry is long becoming a lost art, plath keeps it alive with deep emotion and intense language. one could spend years reading this collection over and over.

Simply put, "Birthday Letters" is not Ted Hughes's best work. It contains some moving poetry, particularly "Life after Death," but overall it is lax and digressive both in form and in content. Many of the poems assume the titles of Plath's own work, but instead of illuminating her, they merely reiterate familiar images. "Birthday Letters" also exposes a contradiction inherent in Hughes himself: while in many of the poems he seems to abrognate responsibility for his wife's suicide by subscribing to the belief that, in a sense, Sylvia was doomed from the start. In his translation of Alcestis, one senses that the character of Admetos is one with whom Hughes identifies: Look what you did: you let her die instead. You live now Only because you let Death take her. You killed her. Point-blank She met the death that you dodged...

"Birthday Letters" should not be read biographically, for it is art, not a memoir of Plath or their marriage. To obtain a deeper understanding of Hughes and his marriage, one should read the visionary poetry of Alcestis and Hughes's masterpiece, Crow.

Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II, is the author of more than forty books of poems, prose, and translation. He has received the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and now the W. H. Smith Award for his Tales of Ovid. However, what first brought him into the limelight was the death of his poet wife, Sylvia Plath - an incident that sent shock waves through literary circles in1963 and had all the radical feminists up in arms against the man who had allegedly driven his wife to a self-inflicted death. Ever since, Hughes has been at the centre of controversies.

Condemned to live on as a survivor, for many years Hughes wrote nothing but children's verse. At the same time he concentrated on bringing out Sylvia Plath's poems, letters (edited by her mother, Aurelia Plath) and journals. And then, when he did turn back to poetry, not surprisingly, he focused on the negative side of life, the darker forces in the universe which are forever threatening man. He did not write of personal experiences. He did not write of his wife's suicide, or of emotional and other disasters he surely must have suffered. And yet the sense of doom crept into his poetry through symbols from the animal world: the jaguar, the the hawk, and the crow - masks from the world of nature that the poet donned to hide the pain he lived through. Meanwhile the Plath myth has grown. It has all the makings of a cult: the love and the hate, the betrayal and the anger, with the sensationalism climaxing in self-destructive violence.

The present volume of poems, Birthday Letters, is very different from the earlier collections. Whereas earlier Hughes liked to assume the role of a sort of wild man of the woods surrounded by his animals and birds, here we have Ted Hughes the man, the husband and the lover, without his mask. These are poems, personal and intimate, addressed to Sylvia Plath, written over a period of thirty-five years following her death.

In order to appreciate the poems of Birthday Letters fully the reader needs to be familiar with the life and work of Sylvia Plath. There are at least three crucial biographical facts that cast their shadow on her work: one, the premature death of her father when she was barely eight; two, the separation from her husband, Ted Hughes, in whom she saw a father surrogate; and, three, her suicide attempts, the first unsuccessful one at the age of twenty-one, and the final successful attempt in her thirtieth year. On these major events of Plath's life is based her major poetry, its cries of helpless rage alternating with gloomy despair, its narcissistic concern with the individual self colouring all themes and subjects she chooses to write of. And these are the events referred to repeatedly in the new poems of Ted Hughes.

Birthday Poems may thus be considered a companion piece to Sylvia Plath's poetry, offering another understanding of it by filling in the background to poems, to the early days of their courtship and the growing intensity of their relationship. A sense of fatality seems to be an integral part of the relationship, right from the beginning:

"Nor did I know I was being auditioned
For the male lead in your drama,
Miming through the first easy movements
As if with eyes closed, feeling for the role.
As if a puppet were being tried on its strings,
Or a dead frog's legs touched by electrodes."

A suicide, they say, kills two people - the one who dies and the one who doesn't. As the survivor who didn't, Ted Hughes has silently borne his private hell over the last thirty-five years. This is what the poems testify. But if writing them must have been a painful process, breaking his silence and compiling them for public consumption could not possibly have been easy. And so he speaks of the
"Old despair and new agony / Melting into one familiar hell."

Images and themes from Plath's work find their way repeatedly into Hughes' poems. "Sam" refers to the time when Plath's horse (Ariel) ran wild. She had hung on to his neck and returned to the stables in a state of shock. The image of the Hanging God from Plath figures several times and is linked to the Daddy figure that, according to Hughes and other Plath critics, was the harbinger of doom in her life. The arrow symbol of "Ariel," the fixed stars governing one's life, the Bronte countryside, the man in black, the stalking panther, azalea flowers, the works of Giorgio de Chiricio - these are images from Sylvia Plath's work that Hughes draws upon and they all testify that for him she is still a presence that he must live with whether he likes it or not.

Perhaps Hughes is trying to exonerate himself. It is not surprising that he talks about Sylvia Plath's life as a struggle to keep in control. Driven by the demons to succeed, she had to pay a heavy price for fame and recognition. In "Ouija," Hughes describes an early premonition of doom:
"Maybe you'd picked up a whisper that I could not
Before our glass could stir, some still small voice:
'Fame will come. Fame especially for you.
Fame cannot be avoided. And when it comes
You will have paid for it with your happiness,
Your husband and your life.'"
Hughes poems are like snapshots frozen in time, best understood by a reader who approaches them without prejudice against the author. They give us the survivor's story of what it was like to be bonded to a brilliant, fiery individual who was to be transformed into a myth, into something of an immortal cult figure, who was destined to live a brief but meteoric life. And who flamboyantly proclaimed that dying was an art: like everything else she did it exceptionally well.

I have read countless books about the life and works of Sylvia Plath, and in doing so, have attempted to uncover whatever real truths exist about the love affair between Sylvia and Ted. I think this book of gorgeous narrative poems is testimony that often, there is no 'simple answer' or 'person to blame' in a relationship that has failed. It is also testimony to Hughes's undying, colossal love for his former wife, however he may have wrecked it in their youth. It is a beautiful and moving read, particularly if you have read some background material beforehand. All his subtle references take on a much deeper meaning when one knows the details behind them, and the details according to Sylvia. The poetry is lush and shimmers with a sincere, burning love for a troubled woman who left us much too soon.