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Sylvia Plath was a good writer.  She worked very hard and was successful at a very young age, but a lot of people only remember because she was depressed and committed suicide.  Some people have become downright contemptuous towards her, and ascribed her to a school of thought that I’m not sure she belongs in.

Her poetry is really really good and the Bell Jar is pretty good.  It’s become kind of a cult classic, and though it isn’t what I’d call an intellectual novel, it is emotionally mature, well written and interesting.  But The Bell Jar has kind of given women writers a bad name, because Plath killed herself.  Sometimes I wonder what her output would have become if she had lived.  Her poems were alternately cheerful and depressed, but her letters seem to evoke a more optimistic and hopeful personality than either her poems or her prose.

Lately I’ve been thinking about women writers and their fame, their place in the literary world and their acceptance into the “cannon” of classic “Good Books”.  I am trying, and stretching, and there are still not that many.  One person who I have on the fence is Plath.  Can her one novel, her first even, put her on that list of authors who’ve written Good Books?  I think she’s good enough, and I think the only reason I am doubting her is because of the way people perceived her in the years since her suicide.

It is difficult to separate an author from their aura, or the way they live.  Salinger is that hermit author, and Hemmingway is the guy who killed himself and cheated on his wives.  But somehow, people get past those traits and can look at their literary output.

I don’t know why I was thinking about this so much, but I guess I just wanted to see it in words.  Or maybe I am rushing to defend Plath because I want the list of “good women writers” to be longer.