There are better words to describe this collection than the ones I will use in this mini-review.

Reading this was an emotional experience for me, as I identify with Plath in several issues, at the same time it was a raw, beautiful read. These are short stories and journal entries of a woman who ardently tried to find her meaning in life. Searching for one’s identity, the battle between individualism and conformity, examining individuals' false perceptions about society, and growing up are some of the themes Plath wrote about that are predominant in this collection.

Plath struggled to „get out of herself“ out of the subjective, out of the poetic, and into the objective, more lucrative business of fiction writing. She longed to have her stories published and acknowledged by others. Ironically, the stories where she attempts this approach fall far behind, overshadowed by stories with subjective influence – Johnny Panic and the bible of Dreams, The wishing box, Initiation, Ocean 1212 W. Plath’s greatness lies in the subject matter she wanted to steer away from, and it always saddens me to think how she hadn’t managed to win her internal battle. What she had managed instead was to win over many women, inspiring them, and uniting them in the subjective experience of life, that had it not been put to paper, wouldn’t have been known today as part of a universal experience. Sixty years after Sylvia's death, the lines written in her short piece, appropriately titled „Context“are almost prophetic:

„Certain poems and lines of poetry seem as solid and miraculous to me as church altars or the coronation of queens must seem to people who revere quite different images. I am not worried that poems reach relatively few people. As it is, they go surprisingly far—among strangers, around the world, even. Farther than the words of a classroom teacher or the prescriptions of a doctor; if they are very lucky, farther than a lifetime.“