Since 2010, more than 200 scholarly contributions related to Sylvia Plath have been produced and captured in the MLA International Bibliography. What we see is a consistent and persistent interest in scholarly approaches to Sylvia Plath studies. Indeed, we can witness significant developments in Plath Studies in 2017-2020 alone. The two volumes of Plath’s letters were published by 2018, a scholarly literary biography of Plath is underway, and a book that rethinks how female bodies are represented from feminist perspectives in Plath’s late poetry is anticipated in 2019. These four books collectively make use of the archives and biography, and each may be viewed as a recovery project, from a feminist perspective. These four works attempt to reconstruct and revisit Sylvia Plath, her life and work, and so this scholarship—from contextualized, edited letters to scholarly literary biography to literary feminist criticism—present both new treatments of Plath’s life and work and manifest as new developments in Plath Studies in the twenty-first century.

The panel will be composed of three Plath scholars, who will present research from their forthcoming book projects. Each presentation infuses or pivots on the others in this proposed panel. For instance, understanding and situating Plath’s written words, in both letters and poems, require that one is familiar with her biography because Plath’s life is channeled in these texts. Moreover, the autobiographical letters offer material that aids in situating Plath’s poems within her world, often providing illuminating insight into people, places, things, events, ideas, and themes. The panel will be presided over by a Plath scholar, who will also serve as the respondent.

The panel will begin in the archives, and the first paper will track how the impressive and celebrated publications of Plath’s letters came into existence, and the co-editor of the letters will present lost Plath poems, uncovered in the archive via digital forensics. The next presentation will focus on Plath and biography and the ways in which biographers have pathologized their subject, and the presenter, a Plath biographer, will share new material she has uncovered. The last presentation treats Plath’s poems about Assia Wevill, the other woman in Plath’s relationship with Ted Hughes, and interrogates the Assia poems within a feminist framework; this presentation is part of what will be the first published study that considers Assia’s impact on Plath’s work.

Peter K. Steinberg's paper, "The Indefatigable Sylvia Plath," will showcase Plath’s work from archives. In this talk, Steinberg discusses his role in the production of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, which The Times of London has called "a major literary event." He will cover the publication history of the two volumes of Plath's letters, highlighting archival and textual editing challenges in locating the letters, which were found in more than 55 repositories. This talk will explore the aspects related to securing intellectual control over all the metadata and the role that metadata plays in the published collections of Plath’s letters. Steinberg’s archival work also unearthed lost Plath poems captured on a piece of carbon typing paper, and he will discuss the digital forensics undertaken to reveal these hidden texts.

Heather Clark’s “P(l)athography: Sylvia Plath and Her Biographers” provides an overview of the role Plath biographies have played in pathologizing their subject. Clark will argue that their illness-centered narratives have diminished Plath’s intellectual and creative legacy. She will also discuss the challenges she has faced writing a biography of Plath, and the wealth of new material she has drawn upon. Caught in the limbo between icon and cliché, Plath has been mythologized by biographers as a high priestess of poetry, obsessed with death. From the beginning, biographies have focused on the trajectory of Plath’s mental illness and suicide, as if her every act from childhood on was predetermined. Portraits of Plath as a crazed poetic priestess still dominate public perception. Her most recent biographer, Andrew Wilson, called her “a sorceress who had the power to attract men with a flash of her intense eyes, a tortured soul whose only destiny was death by her own hand.”[1] Such caricatures have calcified into the popular, reductive version of Sylvia Plath we all know: the suicidal writer of The Bell Jar whose cultish devotees are young women clad in black and full of angst.

Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick’s “‘Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children’: Sylvia Plath’s Representations of Assia Wevill” investigates Assia’s role as a muse in Sylvia Plath’s poetry. An overview will be provided of the following poems that are associated with Assia: “Words heard, by accident, over the phone”; “Burning the Letters”; “The Fearful”; “Childless Woman”; and “The Munich Mannequins.” These poems are important in that they allow us a platform upon which to continue the examination of how gender is conveyed in the work of one of the most important poets in American literature and in twentieth-century world literature. We find depictions of desirable and undesirable femininity, with special attention paid to the beautiful but barren female body as a vehicle for dangerous and bad femininity in Plath’s treatment of Assia. Consideration of Plath as a feminist will be offered, and contextual discussions allow us to orient ourselves within Plath’s life, time, and place in relation to the Assia poems. This presentation emerges out of what will be the first published study that groups Plath’s Assia poems together in a sustained analysis and problematizes them.

Each presentation will run approximately 18 minutes, and 6 minutes will be reserved for the respondent. Per MLA guidelines, the last 15 minutes will be reserved for questions from and discussion with attendees. Janet Badia will serve as a respondent to this proposed session. Badia will address content of the presentations, which she will receive before the convention, and she will offer analysis and commentary that synthesize them, while also providing her own expert view of trends and directions in Plath studies. As presider, Badia will open the floor for questions following her response.

[1] Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted (New York: Scribner, 2013), 13-14,