A close, personal memoir of Sylvia Plath by Nancy Hunter Steiner, who knew Plath at Smith College and shared part of the undergraduate world that would later be mythologised, flattened, argued over, and endlessly re-read. 

Plath before “Plath” became the cultural object — brilliant, ambitious, difficult, funny, exacting, socially alert, and already intensely aware of the codes women were expected to perform. Steiner writes from proximity rather than omniscience, remembering the young woman she knew while also circling the later impossibility of writing about Sylvia Plath without writing through legend, grief, projection, and literary possession. A good companion piece for readers of Plath’s journals, letters, Ariel, Anne Stevenson’s biography, Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman, or anyone interested in the strange afterlife of women writers once their lives become part of the reading apparatus.

First published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber in 1974. Copyright Nancy Hunter Steiner, 1973. Good reading copy with visible cover handling, light staining/marking, rubbing, and some edge/corner wear.