Literary Lives

Archives and Hives

Three books which tell of Sylvia Plath’s spring

by Felicity Plunkett • October 2025, no. 480

The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath, edited by Peter K. Steinberg

Faber, $75 hb, 848 pp

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Sylvia Plath: A very short introduction by Heather Clark

Oxford University Press, £9.99 pb, 144 pp

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Loving Sylvia Plath: A reclamation by Emily Van Duyne

W.W. Norton, US$27.99 hb, 320 pp

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Sylvia Plath, Smith College, c.1951 (Penrodas Collection/Alamy)

For seven years after her 1963 burial, Sylvia Plath lay in an unmarked grave near St Thomas the Apostle Church in Heptonstall, West Yorkshire. The gravestone, when it came, bore her birth and married names, Sylvia Plath Hughes, the years of her birth and death, and a line from Wu Cheng-en’s sixteenth-century novel Monkey King:Journey to the West: ‘Even amidst fierce flames, the golden lotus can be planted.’

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Felicity Plunkett

Felicity Plunkett is a poet and critic. Her latest work, A Kinder Sea, is published by UQP. Her first collection of poetry Vanishing Point (UQP, 2009) won the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Prize and was shortlisted for several other awards. She has a chapbook Seastrands (2011) in Vagabond Press’ Rare Objects series. Felicity was Poetry Editor for University of Queensland Press and edited Thirty Australian Poets (UQP, 2011). She has a PhD from the University of Sydney and her reviews and essays have been widely published in The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Book Review, Sydney Review of Books etc. Her essay ‘Sound Bridge’, a portrait of Indigenous Australian musician Dr G. Yunupingu, was first published in Australian Book Review and anthologised in Best Australian Essays 2015 (Black Inc, ed. Geordie Williamson).