Provides a compelling argument for Plath s revision of the painful parts of her life--the failed marriage her anxiety for success and her ambivalence towards her mother. . . . The reader will feel the tension in the poetry and the life. Choice [Examines] Plath s twin goals of becoming a famous poet and a perfect mother. . . . This book s main points are clearly and forcefully argued: that both poems and babies require struggle pain endless labor and . . . fears of monstrous offspring and that in the end Plath ran out of the resources necessary to produce both. Often maligned as a self-indulgent confessional poet Plath is here retrieved as a passionate theorist. --Library Journal Susan Van Dyne s reading of twenty-five of Sylvia Plath s Ariel poems considers three contexts: Plath s journal entries from 1957 to 1959 (especially as they reveal her conflicts over what it meant to be a middle-class wife and mother and an aspiring writer in 1950s America); the interpretive strategies of feminist theory; and Plath s multiple revisions of the poems.