Word: sylvia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Broken Glass revisits familiar Miller terrain. The era is the Depression, the battleground is a Jewish family, the ugly rumbling offstage is the rise of Adolf Hitler. The mainspring of the play is the paralysis that Sylvia Gellburg suffers in her legs, which has no apparent physical cause. Is it a result of her sexless and bitter marriage? Is it linked to the futile assimilationism of her Jew-among-Wasps banker husband? Is it somehow tied to her Cassandra-like obsession with Hitler's assault on German Jews, a threat in which no one around her sees urgency...
Just because connoisseurs of poetry rarely read the National Enquirer doesn't mean they don't crave sensationalism. Witness the enduring legend of Sylvia Plath more than three decades after the writer's death. Certainly Plath's reputation as a fierce, accomplished poet has endured, but it is the shocking story of her life that really fascinates the literary public...
...details of Plath's suicide have assumed totemic significance for a cult of followers who regard her as St. Sylvia, the high priestess of suffering. On Feb. 11, 1963, she put her head in a gas oven in her London apartment as her two children, for whom she had left glasses of milk and a plate of bread and butter, slept in a nearby bedroom. Plath's husband Ted Hughes, a great poet who is now England's poet laureate, had left her months earlier for another woman. Before her death, few had ever heard of the 30-year...
...Sylvia Plath were alive today, she would be a venerable 61 years old. (Given the shift in the times, she also might be on Prozac.) But the poet who dies young is remembered in her youthful glory, a literary James Dean. Attention to Plath's life has been paid in inverse proportion to its brevity: five exhaustive biographies have been written about her. In addition, everyone who ever had lunch with Plath has seemingly felt compelled to write a memoir...
...myth, compares the spread of gossip about the poet to "an oil spill in the devastation it wreaked among Plath's survivors, who to this day are like birds covered with black ooze." No one has been more fouled by the Plath oobleck than Hughes. In The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (Knopf; 208 pages; $23), Malcolm chronicles how generations of feminist writers have reviled Hughes for abandoning Plath and for tampering with and even destroying her work. (Hughes' reputation has not been helped by the fact that the woman for whom he left Plath, in a macabre...