In the years soon after [Plath's] death, when scholars approached me, I tried to take their apparently serious concern for the truth about Sylvia Plath seriously. But I learned my lesson early. [...] If I tried too hard to tell them exactly how something happened, in the hope of correcting some fantasy, I was quite likely to be accused of trying to suppress Free Speech. In general, my refusal to have anything to do with the Plath Fantasia has been regarded as an attempt to suppress Free Speech [...] The Fantasia about Sylvia Plath is more needed than the facts. Where that leaves respect for the truth of her life (and of mine), or for her memory, or for the literary tradition, I do not know.

Confessional writing

Plath's case is complicated by the fact that, in her mature work, she deliberately used the details of her everyday life as raw material for her art. A casual visitor or unexpected telephone call, a cut, a bruise, a kitchen bowl, a candlestick - everything became usable, charged with meaning, transformed. Her poems are full of references and images that seem impenetrable at this distance but which could mostly be explained in footnotes by a scholar with full access to the details of her life.

Often, very often. Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicide, in detail and in depth...between the free potato chips. Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem. Sylvia and I often talked opposites. We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric lightbulb, sucking on it. She told the story of her first suicide in sweet and loving detail, and her description in The Bell Jar is just that same story. It is a wonder we didn’t depress George [Starbuck] with our egocentricity; instead, I think, we three were stimulated by it...even George...as if death made each of us a little more real at the moment.

Impact

Within a week of her death, intellectual London was hunched over copies of a strange and terrible poem she had written during her last sick slide toward suicide. Daddy was its title; its subject was her morbid love-hatred of her father; its style was as brutal as a truncheon. What is more, Daddy was merely the first jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bale across the literary landscape. [...] Death like a Poem. In her most ferocious poems, Daddy and Lady Lazarus, fear, hate, love, death and the poet's own identity become fused at black heat with the figure of her father, and through him, with the guilt of the German exterminators and the suffering of their Jewish victims. They are poems, as Robert Lowell says in his preface to Ariel, that "play Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder."

When Sylvia Plath’s Ariel was published in the United States in 1966, American women noticed. Not only women who ordinarily read poems, but housewives and mothers whose ambitions had awakened [...] Here was a woman, superbly trained in her craft, whose final poems uncompromisingly charted female rage, ambivalence, and grief, in a voice with which many women identified.

Later posthumous collections

Now they want to make a filmFor anyone lacking the abilityTo imagine the body, head in oven,Orphaning children [...]

[...] they thinkI should give them my mother's wordsTo fill the mouth of their monster,Their Sylvia Suicide Doll

From My Mother, in The Book of Mirrors (2003) by Frieda Hughes

Poetry collections

• The Colossus and Other Poems (1960)
• Ariel (1961—1965)
• Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices (1968)
• Crossing the Water (1971)
• Winter Trees (1971)
• The Collected Poems (1981)
• Selected Poems (1985)
• Plath: Poems (1998)

Audio poetry readings

• Sylvia Plath Reads, Harper Audio (2000)

Collected prose and novels

• The Bell Jar: A novel (1963), under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas"
• Correspondence 1950—1963 (1975)
• Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts (1977)
• The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)
• The Magic Mirror (published 1989), Plath's Smith College senior thesis
• The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil (2000)

Children's books

• The Bed Book (1976)
• The It-Doesn't-Matter-Suit (1996)
• Collected Children's Stories (UK, 2001)
• Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen (2001)

• Alexander, Paul. (1991). Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath. Da Capo Press. ISBN 0306812991.
• Alvarez, Al (2007) Risky Business. Bloomsbury. ISBN 9780747587446
• Axelrod, Steven Gould. (1992). Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words. Johns Hopkins University. ISBN 080184374X.
• Becker, Jillian. (2003). Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath, A memoir. New York: St Martins Press. ISBN 0312315988.
• Butscher, Edward. (2003). Sylvia Plath: Method & Madness (A Biography). ISBN 0971059829.
• Hayman, Ronald. (1991). The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath. Carol Publishing. ISBN 1559720689.
• Helle, Anita (Ed). (2007). The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0472069276.
• Kirk, Connie Ann. (2004). Sylvia Plath: A Biography. Greenwood Press. ISBN 0313332142.
• Malcolm, Janet. (1995). The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Vintage. ISBN 0679751408.
• Middlebrook, Diane. (2003). Her Husband: Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath, a Marriage. Viking Adult. ISBN 0670031879.
• Steinberg, Peter. (2004). Sylvia Plath. Chelsea House. ISBN 0791078434.
• Plath Helle, Anita. (2007). The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0472069276.
• Stevenson, Anne. (1989). Bitter Fame. A Life of Sylvia Plath. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0395453747.
• Wagner, Erica. (2002). Ariel's Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and the Story of Birthday Letters. W.W. Norton. ISBN 0393323013.
• Wagner-Martin, Linda. (2003). Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0333631145.
• Wagner-Martin, Linda (Ed). (1988). Sylvia Plath (Critical Heritage). Routledge. ISBN 0415009103.

• Hemphill, Stephanie. (2007). Your Own, Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath. ISBN 037583799X.
• Kyle, Barry. (1976). Sylvia Plath: A Dramatic Portrait Conceived and Adapted from Her Writings. Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0571106981.