The Sylvia Effect

Yesterday, in honor of Sylvia Plath's birthday, the Reader's Almanac published a comprehensive tribute to the poet by examining the plethora of Plath biographies written since the poet's early death. Unsurprisingly, in many accounts Plath has come to be defined more by her death than her life:

Getting past the Sylvia Plath myth to get to the poetry seems to be more than an annual problem. In 2001 psychologist James C. Kaufman coined the term the “Sylvia Plath Effect” (“the phenomenon that creative writers are more susceptible to mental illness”). In the five decades since her death a rancorous debate has raged over which of several biographies portrays her life more accurately—and each one struggled to shift the focus from her life to her work.

Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath by biographer and poet Anne Stevenson is one of the most controversial Plath biographies for its focus on the motivations behind her suicide. Stevenson, who worked on the book for three years, unpacked much of the death imagery in Plath's poems, and even uses her own her poetic tributes:

Stevenson has written three poems for Plath: “Nightmare, Daymoths”; “Hot Wind, Hard Rain”; and “Letter to Sylvia Plath.” She wrote “Letter” in 1988 just as she was finishing her biography, as one stanza acknowledges:

Dear Sylvia, we must close our book.
Three springs you’ve perched like a black rook
between sweet weather and my mind.
At last I have to seem unkind
and exorcise my awkward awe.
My shoulder doesn’t like your claw.