The premise of The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, by Jacqueline Rose, is that “Sylvia Plath haunts our culture,” illuminating and even anticipating debates that are currently in vogue, such as the conflicting claims of art and popular culture, and the connection between women’s sexual fantasies and gender-based power relations—to name only two. Rose has a way of staking out an argument in terms more favorable to how she chooses to define an issue a priori than to how it might seem to readers who don’t ride her particular hobby horses. It is convenient to the author’s argument for her to say that “execrated and idolised, Plath hovers between the furthest poles of positive and negative appraisal.” The negative side of such a dichotomy grossly misrepresents the current critical opinion of Plath’s poetry, which is all but universally held in high esteem.

It is true that “there are those who pathologize Plath, freely diagnose her as schizophrenic or psychotic, read her writings as symptom or warning, something we should both admire and avoid.” Does it follow, as Rose goes on to say, that “the spectre of psychic life rises up in her person as a monumental affront for which she is punished”? I think not. Readers are more likely to feel pity or wonder. Anne Stevenson asserts in her 1989 biography, Bitter Fame, that “Plath’s true subject was this inner self, not her outer experiences and achievements.” Rose counters: