The books that Sylvia Plath adored
It’s basically a canon event for every creative girl in her twenties to have a borderline neurotic obsession with Sylvia Plath. However, it’s largely for good reason – rarely has one unique voice summed up the trials, tribulations, identity politics and idiosyncrasies of womanhood in a way that all at once felt so intimate but also universally visceral.
Of course, the facts of Plath’s own life bore a controversial influence over her own work, whether it was her notorious marriage to fellow writer Ted Hughes or the myriad references to the mental illnesses that she suffered throughout her life, ultimately leading to her tragic suicide in 1963 when she was 30 years old. But in the space of such a short career, Plath created a transcendental force that forever changed the face of literature – weaving complexity into notions of femininity never before discussed, and subsequently becoming one of the world’s most celebrated writers.
Plath’s seminal poetry collections Colossus and Ariel stand testament to her enrapturing power, but perhaps the most prolific and insightful exploration into her imagined world was her singular novel The Bell Jar, written in 1963, which served as the most expansive key to her literary horizons. In both a poetic and novelistic sense, she had been linked to ‘confessional’ writers such as Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, but the books she cherished most tender to tell a much richer story.
Plath was significantly influenced by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose novels The Idiot, The Double, and The Brothers Karamazov constituted some of her all-time favourite works. In addition, other Russian literary greats in the form of Leo Tolstoy and his 1878 classic books Anna Karenina and War and Peace were also worshipped by Plath, bridging on the themes of realism, modernism, marriage, and betrayal that were often similarly pertinent to her own work.
The author was also highly reverential of a range of more romantic offerings, namely by DH Lawrence, in the novels Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Sons and Lovers, and Women in Love. However, the highly explicit sexual nature of many of Lawrence’s works, including these, also bears a point of interest in Plath’s own canon. Always pushing the boundaries of women’s representation, her portrayals of female sexuality, mental health, and agency have become significant markers in the entirety of literary history, even if penned much more contemporarily than some of her predecessors.
Rounding out Plath’s favourable list are a slew of other notable classics including The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien, The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald, and A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf. While undeniably all of these novels and authors have had seismic impacts on almost every writer across the literary canon, it is interesting that they also left a lasting impression on Plath, who despite not sharing genres or style, still had an all-knowing awareness and appreciation of words that transformed her into a literary great.
As has been demonstrated on countless occasions over time, Plath is an entire mode of study all on her own. Whether it’s the technical aspects of her poetry or the convoluted narrative of her life, so much was channelled into one woman’s blazing story that no matter how much she is examined, no one will truly ever be able to fully unpick her enigmas. Branching out to look at her favourite books is yet another method of dissection – but equally, also just leads down deeper and deeper rabbit holes.
