Word: sylvia
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...SYLVIA PLATH...
When Aurelia Plath told her eight-year-old daughter Sylvia that her father was dead, the child said, "I am never going to speak to God again." When she came home from school that day she presented her mother with an oath to be signed: "I promise never to marry again...
...Sylvia took all of life with terrifying seriousness; the words "never again" came only too quickly to her. She was capable of emotional fixity that makes the poems written just before her suicide in 1963 nearly unbearable: pictures of rage and despair drawn virtually in words of one syllable. Her novel The Bell Jar, while written in quasi-Salinger style, is a remorseless account of adolescent breakdown...
Partly to adjust the image that the novel created of both mother and daughter, Mrs. Plath is publishing an edited edition of Sylvia's copious letters home, from the time she entered Smith College in 1950 until her death. The correspondence will not erase The Bell Jar -those caricatures are indelible. But they do give a different, lively, poignant picture of Sylvia...
...Sylvia arrived trailing three scholarships and several writing prizes. The Plaths had no money, and she worried continually about it. She owed her "charmed Plathian existence" to her schoolteacher mother's efforts, and she was driven by gratitude. "You are the most wonderful mummy that a girl ever had," she wrote, "and I only hope I can continue to lay more laurels at your feet...