Overview

The complete edition of Sylvia Plath's prose including much unpublished and previously uncollected material, edited by Peter K. Steinberg. The Collected Prose stands alongside the Journals (2000) and the two volume Letters (2017 and 2018) to support a more complete understanding of Sylvia Plath's ambition and achievement as a writer. Expanding on the selection published as Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977), this volume draws together all of Sylvia Plath's shorter prose, much of which is previously uncollected and unpublished. The volume embraces her experiments with the short story and pieces of non-fiction from the 1940s through to her more polished compositions of the fifties and early sixties, including fragments of fiction as well as her journalism and book reviews. Themes and associations become apparent as the volume offers new, intertextual ways of reading across Plath's oeuvre, colouring and shading our understanding and appreciation of her extraordinary talent. 'To see so much of [Plath's] surviving fiction and journalism, so many of her essays and reviews, finally published under one cover is to be surprised all over again by the breadth of her vision, ambition and talent . . . A major literary event and an invaluable scholarly resource.' Heather Clark, TLS From reviews of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume I: 1940-1956 and Volume II: 1956-1963: 'Sylvia Plath was not only a great poet, she also forged some of the best prose of the twentieth century. . . she wrote letters of extraordinary wit and vivacity. Their publication is a major literary event.' The Times 'These letters are by turns poignant, revelatory, banal, hilarious and self-absorbed, documenting as they do the changing moods, ambitions and intellectual and creative development of one of the twentieth century's most celebrated poets.' Evening Standard 'Such was the impact of [Plath's] exploration of both inner and outer landscapes in staggeringly intense, brutal and lyrical language that her loss to the literary world has been mourned ever since.' Financial Times

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Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at Smith College. In 1955 she went to Cambridge University where she met Ted Hughes, whom she married in 1956. She published one collection of poems in her lifetime, The Colossus (1960), and a novel, The Bell Jar (1963). Plath's volume Ariel (1965) secured her reputation and her Collected Poems (1981) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Archivist Peter K. Steinberg has published widely on Sylvia Plath including the introduction to The Spoken Word: Sylvia Plath (British Library, 2010). He is co-editor (with Karen V. Kukil) of the two-volume edition of The Letters of Sylvia Plath (2017, 2018).

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