dear sinister, i know... so far i have been more than invisible on this list, lurking around, being half-assed about my membership, but in light of the 'Sylvia is a prig/notprig' conversation, i just had to say... "The Story of Sylvia and Ted: A Novel" by Emma Tennant, a former lover of Ted Hughes, is poised for release in may 2001 - an attempt at 'fictionalizing' the marriage, etc. Supposedly Tennant caused an uproar with her inclusion of the 'affair' bits in some bio she wrote earlier, or so my all-knowing book-crazed boss tells me. The bad news is that this 'novel' supposedly isn't going to be published in the UK, to feign controversy. iiinnteresting... isn't it? And now for my opinion. Yes Sylvia was a bit of a flake, if you read her journals it becomes blatantly obvious, but if anyone read my journals, they'd get the same impression, which is why i wonder about the ethics behind publishing someone's journal, but i'm hypocritical and nosey and will read them anyway! Some of her poems were good, some were crap. She just tried too hard to be 'astute', and respected, and successful, and it came out rigid and contrived most of the time. She never thought anything she did was good enough - a self-consiousness which was probably fueled by living with ted, and typing his manuscripts up for him, and other things... 'Ariel', i think, is Plath at her most emotive, and if she hadn't killed herself she may have matured, and learned how to hone this. Then again, who knows how much praise it would have drawn in her presence, or how much she may have cut it up - obscuring the work. She did publish the quite autobiographical novel 'the bell jar' under a pseudonym, after all. **In conclusion!** i appreciate both of them for their contributions, and enjoy their work, but i find neither of them particularily exciting anymore - in a lyrical sense... however they do serve to satiate my voyeristic tendancies from time to time, and needless to say i will be reading the Tennant novel when it comes out in Canada! thats all! jillian __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 a year! http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+