ABSTRACT
Few writers have been more famous for being confessional – that is, for using their poetry and prose to tell their own stories – than Sylvia Plath. Biographies of Plath, which take many different forms, have done much to promote her as a confessional writer. But as John Sutherland writes, ‘Every biography, even the most exhaustively researched, will be partial and, in crucial matters, irredeemably ignorant’ (2004). I want to demonstrate the limits and dangers of reading Plath as a confessional writer by revealing the fundamental flaws in the biographical material on which such readings are based. The material I will focus on will include conventional biographies, Plath’s own letters and journals, fictional and cinematic treatments of Plath’s life, and recent comments by Plath’s daughter, Frieda Hughes, about her mother’s life and work. My position is not that Plath never wrote about herself, but that we can seldom know when she did, because so little of her life and thoughts, like anyone’s, can be reliably documented. Moreover, to apply biographical material – whether it is trustworthy or not – to Plath’s writing can result in a distorted view of what is in that writing, or even a failure to see what its other interests are.
