Sylvia Plath's writing has been the subject of a rich proliferation of critiques and approaches. These include readings which identify the work as confessional, those which highlight mythological elements and those which draw on the insights of psychoanalysis. Diverse and changing forms of feminist approach have also been applied fruitfully over the decades, as have readings that emphasise the specific historical circumstances in which Plath lived and wrote. In this final chapter I outline some of the key critical approaches to Plath's writing, and briefly note some new directions in Plath studies. I begin, though, with one of the major – if disputable – ways of accessing Plath's writing: through the many biographical studies which have emerged in the decades since her death.

Biography

Plath has been the subject of five full-length biographies and countless memoirs, sketches and biographical interpretations. One of the reasons for this plethora of biographical accounts might be that each, on its own, seems unsatisfactory and serves only to stimulate or provoke the next. As Jacqueline Rose puts it, ‘Plath biographies tend to answer each other, shouting like opponents across a legal gulf, each one insisting that she or he has a greater claim to the truth than the one who went before.’ Perhaps, too, there is something specific to Plath's writing that seems to tantalise readers and biographers, inviting them close but then barring the door to any further scrutiny.