Girl and Sylvia

In the modern literary landscape, the novel about a novelist writing a novel has become de rigueur. It can provide an ideal setting for a meditation on the complexities of living a creative life. Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s début novel, But the Girl, follows in this contemporary tradition, but offers something more compelling than navel-gazing: a critique of classical literature, specifically the work of Sylvia Plath, through personal and academic lenses.

The novel considers Plath as both woman and writer through the eyes of its protagonist, referred to simply as Girl: an Asian-Australian student undertaking a residency in Scotland in order to write a postcolonial novel and a PhD on Plath’s poetry (‘Seriously, another Plath scholar? More ink spilled on this white woman in perpetua?’ asks another student incredulously). It takes a metatextual form, both inhabiting and deconstructing itself and its influences – Yu’s opening sentence riffs on the first lines of The Bell Jar, and she frequently pokes fun at the pretensions of the academic and literary worlds (Girl admits that she calls her work-in-progress a ‘postcolonial novel’ rather than an ‘immigrant novel’ even though she doesn’t know exactly what postcolonialism is).

Girl falls in love with The Bell Jar as an undergraduate student – ‘I felt something new, brand new… [it] kidnapped my mind clean away’ – and is just as quickly ‘hurt like hell’ to read Plath’s description of her own reflection as ‘a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman staring idiotically into my face’. Exploring the contradiction of being simultaneously seen and erased by literature, Yu dissects Plath’s mythology in a way that reflects the modern parlance of a ‘problematic fave’.