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‘The world is blood-hot and personal’: in her moving and illuminating introduction, the poet Emily Berry remembers her own teenage encounters with Ariel and offers a personal way into this definitive collection. She shows us how Plath can crystallize our most volatile emotions, transforming them into images so potent and precise that they resonate with us all. Plath has been an inspiration to successive generations; her influence, enduring and profound.
‘If the poems are despairing, vengeful and destructive, they are at the same time tender, open to things, and also unusually clever, sardonic, hardminded . . . They are works of great artistic purity and, despite all the nihilism, great generosity . . . the book is a major literary event.’ A. Alvarez, Observer, 1965
Sylvia Plath (1932–63) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at Smith College. In 1955 she went to Cambridge University on a Fulbright scholarship, where she met and later married Ted Hughes. She published one collection of poems in her lifetime, The Colossus (1960), and a novel, The Bell Jar (1963). Her Collected Poems, which contains her poetry written from…
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Peter K. Steinberg, editor of The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath, reflects on the journey of bringing this volume into …
Our Poem of the Week is ‘You’re’ by Sylvia Plath, from her collection Ariel.
Tom Ayling selects classic Faber titles to accompany BookTok recommendations he is making on TikTok all this week.
Sylvia Plath, poet, novelist, short story writer, was born ninety years ago on 27 October, 1932.
Shirley Tucker produced her iconic cover for Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar in the 1960s, and she remembers the design …
Celebrating our 90th anniversary, Faber staff take on the tricky task of selecting their three favourite Faber books.
Faber will publish ‘Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom’, a previously unpublished story by Sylvia Plath, as part of the …
Read Peter K. Steinberg n bringing Plath to life through her correspondence in the Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol. II.
Read a fascinating essay by Karen V. Kukil, editor of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, on the rare material behind …
'Winter Words', a new, unseen poem by a 23-year-old Sylvia Plath, was written in 1955 whilst she was at Smith …
'Plath is most powerful when she explores what it means to be a woman in an unequal world - and …