Sylvia Plath on Writing
Faber
Published 5th November 2026
A unique gathering of Sylvia Plath’s thoughts on her writing life, selected by Maura Dooley.
Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences . . .
Sylvia Plath always knew that she wanted to be a writer and she always wrote. This unique gathering of excerpts from her journals, letters, poems and prose offers razor-sharp, inspiring, amusing and painful insights into what it means to commit to a writing life. Plath wants, above all, to be truthful and exact, whether unlocking a childhood memory, exulting in new landscapes and lives or squaring up to marriage and motherhood. She doesn't think poems 'should be all that chaste; and reaches past decorum and convention to capture her subject exactly with an astonishing image or phrase.
This is a book for writers as much as for readers, and for anyone wanting to understand how a commitment to craft, to precision and technique, to looking hard and seeing clearly, is what lays the foundations for work such as Plath's with all its radical genius and enduring emotional power.
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at Smith College. In 1955 she went to Cambridge University on a Fulbright scholarship, where she met Ted Hughes, whom she married in 1956. She published one collection of poems in her lifetime, The Colossus (1960), and a novel, The Bell Jar (1963). Plath’s volume Ariel (1965) secured her reputation, and her Collected Poems (1981) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Maura Dooley’s latest poetry collection, Light that is both wave and particle will be published in 2027, together with her Selected Poems: Dancing at Oakmead Road (Bloodaxe). She has edited anthologies of love poetry and women’s poetry, the essay collection, How Novelists Work, and is Professor Emerita of Goldsmiths, University of London.
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