Sylvia Plath's Fiction

A Critical Study

Luke Ferretter, Professor of English

This is the first study devoted to Sylvia Plath's fiction. Plath wrote fiction throughout her life, in a wide variety of genres, including women's magazine romances, New Yorker stories, comedy, social criticism, autobiography, teenage fiction and science fiction. She wrote novels before and after The Bell Jar. Discussing all these novels and stories, and based on research in the three major archives of her work, this book is the complete study of Plath's fiction. The author analyses her influences as a fiction writer, the relationships between her poetry and fiction, the political views she expresses in her fiction, and devotes two chapters to the central concern of her novels and stories, the roles of women in contemporary society.

Edinburgh University Press, 2010

ISBN 9780748625093

"With tenacity and clear-eyed scholarly authority, Luke Ferretter has gone into the archive and emerged with a systematic sourcebook for readers of Sylvia Plath's fiction...Adeptly drawing on and adding to the body of recent criticism that has enlarged our sense of the scope and complexity of Plath's creativity, this is a very valuable book." —Langdon Hammer, Yale University