Each of these stories are incredibly powerful in their own way and Sylvia Plath continues to amaze me with her writing, her mindset and just everything.

I really love Sylvia Plath. I wish she’d written more essays. I also think Stone Boy with Dolphin is a masterpiece of writing and would’ve been an extraordinary novel. I wish the version I’d read had the works in chronological order as opposed to reverse chronological, which was weird. It’s all great, but you can see the quality increase as she gains experience.

Being mythological does wonders for one's ego.

"When a major work by a major writer is published posthumously, no one bats an eye," Margaret Atwood wrote in January 1979,

Minor works by minor writers presumably don't get published until the author has been dead long enough to have become quaint. "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams" is a minor work by a major writer, and it's the contrast that causes niggling. Whom does such a publication benefit? Not the author, and not the author's reputation, which is doing very well without it. Not the general reader hitherto innocent of the Sylvia Plath opus and myth who may stumble upon it and wonder what all the shouting is about. [...] I have to admit at the outset that this kind of publication makes me uneasy by definition, hinting as it does of [rummagings] in bureau drawers that the author, had she lived, would doubtless have kept firmly locked. What writer of sane mind would willingly give to the world her undergraduate short stories, her disgruntled jottings on the doings of unpleasant neighbors, her embarrassing attempts to write formula magazine fiction?

To an extent I agree with her: I too am uncomfortable with posthumously published works, such as the bulk of Franz Kafka's writing (he asked for it to be burned after his death, but the friend to whom he entrusted this task, Max Brod, broke the promise and instead published it), Plath's complete diaries* (which she did not intend for public consumption, unlike, say, Anne Frank), or Män som hatar kvinnor (which was unfinished at the time of Stieg Larsson's death and thus presents the audience with a very different portrait of the author than we would have seen had he finished the manuscript). However, where Atwood and I differ is in regards to the quality of the short stories. Labelling Johnny Panic as "a minor work by a major writer" does Plath's prose a great disservice.

*Sylvia Plath's diaries were originally published in 1982 in a heavily abridged version authorised by her husband, Ted Hughes. Ironically, Plath wrote in her diaries upon her first meeting with Hughes that she felt their relationship would lead to her death.

I read this a few years ago and it feeds my love of short stories. A whole novel about the crazy or depressing people would be too much, but changing it up every 10 pages makes it work. Plus I like reading her personal writing and then seeing how she turned it into a fiction piece.

Underrated, dismissed, avoided, ignored. Every word that means not respected enough - because these short stories are not respected or appreciated enough.

I have studied 4 for my Undergrad Diss and 2 for my MA Diss, and the rest have been a joy to read. Plath’s Short stories are shunned in comparison to The Bell Jar, and I believe it is because they are more challenging. They’re shorter so her metaphors, double meanings and subtle remarks are much more difficult to discover. They require work and that is why I enjoy them.

Personal faves:
Title Name Story
The Daughters of Blossom Street
Ocean 1212-W
Context
Cambridge Notes
Sunday at The Mintons
Mothers

Since studying them I have discovered they match Plath’s mindset far more than these grandiose TBJ statements and criticisms do - to read them against her journals provides connections between what she was interested in, reading, writing, studying, watching at the moment she is writing them. The time periods line up and the subject matter do as well, she writes for the moment. To try and use TBJ as a fixed autobiographical account for her entire life ignores a lot of her as a multifaceted character - some are short, sporadic childless writings because she was once a child that wanted to play around with colour and light and adjectives, she was not always this Esther Greenwood character that the world has tried to confide her to. I hope that future Plath scholars focus on her short stories more, I would hate to see them get lost.

I reread her everyday at the moment for my dissertation ♡

solidified Sylvia Plath as the voice and expression of the anomie i felt in my late teens/early twenties.