Perpetual Rewriting: Sylvia Plath’s Biographies

Abstract

For almost four decades after she died, Sylvia Plath’s executors (The Sylvia Plath Estate) carefully guarded biographical details concerning the circumstances of the writer’s final months of life. As generations passed and archives opened, Plath scholarship was enriched with new perspectives feeding on new materials and documents. I shall explore the impact of archival elements on the constant revising and rewriting of Sylvia Plath’s biography, while also discussing the relevance of the unpublished manuscripts of some biographers. Despite their long and thorough documentation, they abandoned their projects, leaving, in sealed archives now open, massive amounts of research materials that can now be reevaluated.