ariel's birthday letters home

Poor Ted Hughes has taken one for the Plath team of shrill girls who go about crucifying him at every turn, every freshman year, that I imagine his life to have been in many ways a living hell. Still now, though a bit less so, he has borne the brunt of the blame for the death of his wife Sylvia Plath. More>>>

this article first appeared on www.blogcritics.org

sadi ranson-polizzotti

sylvia & ted winthrop beach

sylvia and ted on winthrop beach/ colorized / this picture is often said to be in Cape Cod, but the background jetty and the rock formations look more like Sylvia's first home area in Winthrop on Shore Drive with the breakers in the background. It is known that the two did visit Winthrop Beach when they visited the states.

Ariel’s Gift | a review of Erica Wagner’s Book on the story of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and Birthday Letters

After all the books I have been reading on Plath, I have at last found the one that is worthwhile. All of this reading was for my project called “The Plath-Hughes Project” which is part of my Web site. I’ve been seeking that thing that has made Sylvia Plath and her late husband as well, Ted Hughes, the mythical persons that they became, especially Sylvia, in death. >>>more.

a review of janet malcolm's The Silent Woman

I’m not sure what Janet Malcolm was after when she wrote the silent woman. The back-ad copy says that this is a “feat of literary detection” and that in The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm examines the biographies of Sylvia Plath to create a book about Plath’s afterlife. Malcolm succeeds in giving us a very, very thorough retelling of the various biographies, with a special focus on Anne Stevenson whom she portrays as a rather weak writer and victimized by Plath executor Olwyn Hughes (Ted Hughes, Plath’s husband’s sister). Olwyn, as anyone who knows about Plath knows, never was one to mince words and she is fierce in her protection of the image of Plath that she will allow the public to see. As long as Olwyn is alive, there will be biographies that are authorized that read like Anne Stevenson’s Bitter Fame – which is to say, expected, >>>More.

92 johnson, in Winthrop Massachusetts 

court green garden

the graveyard backing the plath-hughes property in the country in devon, Court Green, England.

sylvia | the film

It took three separate viewings before I felt I could say anything about the film “Sylvia” starring Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath and Daniel Craig as Ted Hughes, and it was only after reading yet more biographies, both of Plath and Hughes that I felt I could comment with any authority.

The film is lukewarm at best, and though technically it gets many of the major details correct, what it lacks and what it does not show with any real authoritative voice is the passion that existed between the two and the real despair. Paltrow is somewhat believable as Plath, though an odd choice for the role, given her build; Plath herself was a big-boned girl, not fat or overweight, but large boned, and long in the bone and rather Teutonic in some ways, a real pin-up (which she actually did for a few silly articles while at Smith for which she posed in some cheesecake shots in a bathing suit). Paltrow is too watery to thin, though her performance is what carries this film through. Perhaps because Paltrow had, so recently before shooting began, lost her own father that she was able to plumb the depths and really get to the core of Plath’s serious depression and downward spirals. Her tears are convincing, and under the circumstances, one could believe, likely real. What’s more, Plath as we all know, had a real daddy thing, and that Paltrow had lost her own father would no doubt have helped her relate to such a trying role as Sylvia must have been. more>>>

Her Husband: A Review of Diane Middlebrook on the Plath-Hughes Deal

sylvia & ted on their honeymoon

Well, thank God someone has finally written a Plath book that isn’t all Plath. Kudos to Diane Middlebrook for writing about the infamous Ted Hughes as he related to his wife Sylvia, the poetess extraordinaire, the yin to his yang, or as some believe, the yin to her yang and giving us at last the balanced portrait that we’ve been searching for all these years.>> more

giving up | the last days of Sylvia Plath - a review

Giving Up the last days of sylvia plath by Jillian Becker a review by sadi ranson-polizzotti

As part of my ongoing and recent resurgent interest in Sylvia Plath, I have greedily gobbled up all of the biographies I have and ordered others from Amazon. There is no end, it seems to the amount of information that the public will devour when it comes to Sylvia Plath and likewise, her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, often referred to by her and others as Ted Huge and likewise, she called him her “Colossus,” a name that would be applied to one of her volumes of poetry later on. more>>>

sadi ranson-polizzotti