Tuesday, October 31, 2006

New Sylvia Plath

I remember back when Meg Ryan was saying to the press that she wanted to make a movie about Sylvia Plath one day. I thought that showed there was a darkness in her that movies like "When Harry Met Sally" and "You've Got Mail" had managed to conceal completely. Gwyneth Paltrow ultimately played Plath, and her performance was so natural that it's hard to imagine anyone else in the role. As far as Plath as a writer goes... My favorite angry writer woman with suicidal tendencies is Dorothy Parker, with Fiona Apple running a close second, but Sylvia was no doubt my kinda girl. She wrote: "The moon has nothing to be sad about, Staring from her hood of bone. She is used to this sort of thing. Her blacks crackle and drag."


Student Finds Unpublished Plath Poem: An unpublished sonnet that Sylvia Plath wrote in college while pondering themes in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel "The Great Gatsby" will appear Wednesday in a Virginia online literary journal. What makes the discovery of any unpublished Plath poem noteworthy, Wagner-Martin said, is the groundbreaking expression of humor and anger by a female writer, and her works' lasting impact. "These were not voices you would hear in the '60s in women writers," she said. Plath's "The Bell Jar," which is considered by many as the first American feminist novel, was published in 1963 and was a precursor to decades of feminist writing. But Wagner-Martin said Plath never saw women adopt contemporary attitudes -- she killed herself two weeks after the book was published.

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