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Emily Berry presents a personal meditation on the poetic life and afterlife of Sylvia Plath.

The American poet and novelist Sylvia Plath is a cultural phenomenon. No other modern writer has been quite so mythologised – and pathologized. Her writing and her life (and the way the one seems to admit intimacies about the other) have, in the years since her death in February 1963, become knotted into legend. She is a proto-feminist, a dutiful daughter, an ambitious ex-pat, a wronged wife, an avatar of psychosis or suicide. And a biographical subject par excellence. Her varied writing – sometimes richly allusive and lyrical, sometimes fierce and taboo-breaking – seems to languish in the shadow cast by her biography and the perceived drama of her marriage and young death.

Beyond these refractions, she remains a potent influence on generations of readers and writers, who often forge deeply personal connections with, as it were, their own Sylvia Plath.

Poet Emily Berry is one of those who has been inspired by Sylvia Plath – by the influence and example of her writing and, sometimes, a fascination for her life story. In My Sylvia Plath she reflects, personally and poetically, on that inspiration and the enduring power of Plath’s writing. She hears from those who knew the poet personally: friends, who naturally have their own Sylvia Plath, glimpsed across time and with the fragility of memory; and others, like Emily, who have been influenced by Plath’s work, their writing lives animated by a Sylvia Plath created and recreated in their own likeness.

The ´óÏó´«Ã½ archive contains several recordings made by Sylvia Plath – poems, interviews and commentary – which capture something more rounded than the popular image often allows. The sharp and singular voice of her later poems is there, but so too are her memories of childhood, funny reflections on the eccentricities of the English and glimpses of a tension between the working life and domestic life of a poet who, in her own time, was likely to be consigned to the role of Mrs Ted Hughes – and whose Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize.

Featuring Jillian Becker, Heather Clark, Sarah Corbett, Ruth Fainlight and Shane McCrae.

With thanks to Pamela Lorence.

Producer: Martin Williams