DARK HOOKS

The critical canon has spent decades wringing its hands over Sylvia Plath’s appropriation of both Jewish identity and the particular tragedy of the Holocaust. In 1969, George Steiner wrote in his essay “In Extremis” that Plath “… was a child, plump and golden in America, when the trains actually went,” who therefore lacked the “right” to “draw on the reserves of animate horror in the ash and the children’s shoes.” In 2018, her second volume of Letters was published, covering the period from 1956 to her death in 1963. Considerable press was paid to Plath’s use of anti-Semitic language to describe her husband Ted Hughes’s family, whom she accused in some letters as working against her personal and financial stakes in the marriage, and its end. In The Guardian, Rachel Cooke wondered “what readers will make of her repeated references to the ‘Yorkshire Jew minds’ of the supposedly parsimonious Hughes family.” Plath also called the Hugheses “inhuman Jewy working class bastards,” words that Heather Clark, Plath’s most recent (and thorough) biographer, calls “ugly language” in the book, out in the United States on October 27, 2020.

These (and many other) critiques serve as a stark reminder that, despite the impression that we’ve said all we can say about Sylvia Plath, new material by her continues to emerge, and that much previous work on her lacks nuance and scope. The insistence on seeing the poet as, for instance, a maniacal woman “confessing” her sins for the world