Bitter Fame

a 1989 trade paperback

Although this is the "Official" biography of Sylvia Plath, and, according to Janet Malcolm, the most aesthetically pleasing of the biographies, it has stirred up a huge amount of controversy. Anne Stevenson is a gifted poet in her own right and also wrote a brilliant biography/poetic criticism of Elizabeth Bishop--who you know I love. The controversy is many faceted and would be hard to sum up here but I encourage you to read Janet Malcolm's 1993 New Yorker piece on Bitter Fame... which was the basis of her book, The Silent Woman, which is basically a study of the art of biography using the many available biographies of Sylvia Plath as the premise.

413 pages