Our inherited biases about who should write what live deeper than most of us realize or want to acknowledge.
Sylvia Plath
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Men Explain Sylvia Plath’s Suffering to Us
Emily Van Duyne wonders why Sylvia Plath’s accounts of Ted Hughes’s violence toward her have been so frequently dismissed or minimized.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Why Are We So Unwilling to Take Sylvia Plath at Her Word?
A critical essay raising the question of why many in the literary world cast doubt or treat lightly Sylvia Plath’s allegations of serious abuse at the hand of her husband, poet Ted Hughes — who destroyed many of his wife’s journals from the period before her suicide. Much of her ordeal came to light in […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Life as a Teenage Girl, Living with Doris Lessing
It was a famously cold winter. I’d come from a snowbound Hove, where I’d spent hours sitting and brooding, wrapped up but shivering on the frozen pebbled beach staring out at an icy sea, writing poetry about seagulls and loneliness (no longer extant, thank heavens, though that’s not to say that I wouldn’t write about […]