I highly recommend this seller. He acted with professional courtesy and diligence throughout. Sellers like this make Amazon a delightful and wonderful place to shop for books. Many Thanks, Johnreally good price, really good conditionThis reprint of The Haunting of Sylvia Plath seems the right time for me to post a review, and I am honored to be the first.Jacqueline Rose's The Haunting of Sylvia Plath is extremely valuable to the Plath fan and scholar, pointing out details often ignored and making some keen observations. Perhaps the most important statement of all in this book is that up until now Plath has been shaped by Ted Hughes and other critics, and never owned the facts of her own life. The author points out that while Hughes and his sister Olwyn have been vicious in their omissions and excisions, as well as their slant on the story (Rose calls it Olwyn's "systematic assault on Plath" on page 93), it may not be these things that are problematic as much as it is what was published that Plath never intended to share. Letters Home, for example, was not just the trust between Plath and her mother, but also Plath's careful manipulation of words to keep her mother content and unworried. The Journals were intended always to be private, and Plath would likely have felt violated in knowing they would be published one day. Ultimately, Rose rightly states that a single image of Sylvia Plath is impossible due to the multiplicity of representations of her through Journals, letters, novels, short stories, essays and poetry.Rose discusses the guilty behavior of everyone around Sylvia Plath after her death: the strange edits that shape her character and cast Hughes differently, such as the party when they met. Hughes' theft of her hairband and earring is taken out, but the bite Plath gave to his cheek is left in. He is shown as merely charming, and she is blood-thirsty. Also left out were intensely positive moments, where Plath idealized Hughes. Plath's politics were also downgraded from her work, probably as they were too leftist.Plath also censored herself, and Rose talks about this endless re-writing seen in poetic drafts, in stories that became poems, and more.There is much attention on the bizarre tell-all relationship between Plath and her mother, and the strange "cancellations" of bad events and feelings through writing that Aurelia and Sylvia Plath shared.The Bell Jar is its own problem. Hughes called it a work of fiction, under oath. Rose notes that Aurelia Plath did not believe the Bell Jar was the voice of Plath's "true self," and she presents the Victoria Lucas pseudonym as proof. Still, by all evidence it is mostly autobiography, presented as a "potboiler" to sell, and Plath had always intended to make money writing salable stories.Rose gives many reasons to doubt what has long been presented as fact, due to small changes from one biography to another, assumptions that have been made with no evidence to back them up, and more. Plath's money situation at the time of her separation from Hughes is a glaring example. It presents her on one side as nearly destitute, on another as cashing in on Hughes, and the truth was likely somewhere in between. Rose contends, however, that money broke Plath down nearly as much as anything else.Rose's strongest focus in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath is the feminist angle, and she has a lot of good things to say. She takes editor/poet Peter Davison and author Anne Stevenson to task for slut-shaming. Rose smartly juxtaposes Plath with Freud and psychoanalytic theory, and she spends a good deal of time picking apart the feminist aspects of Plath's poems. Still, the poetic analysis here is not as strong as the author's fine perceptions about Plath and what was going on around her. It is a good book, but not a perfect one.You won't find any clear conclusions about Sylvia Plath in this book because the author doesn't draw any. Instead she emphasizes how Plath's imaginative ambivalence engenders her poetry's haunting mythic aura. In the process, she gives a strong sense of Plath's originality and importance as a writer-- of prose as well as poetry. That's the book's strength: its weakness is the often dense theorizing the reader has to wade through to get to that sense of Plath as a writer. The author is not completely impartial: she comes down on the feminist side of the Plath wars, but she's more flexible than a lot of "masculinist" critics. Anyway, taking on Plath's ambivalence was a big job because it was so powerful, as when, suspecting Ted Hughes of infidelity in 1957, Plath proceeded to blame his Euro-trash influence for the often savage appraisals of her friends and supporters that she'd already been writing in her journal for years. Oh I'm just a poor little Smith girl corrupted by the big bad wolf! Plath still comes off as very likable though.This book started a sort of trend in Plath scholarship: Devalue the biographical. Argue that the figure in the poems is a persona and that biographical truth is elusive. Quite true. But we still should look for biographical truth. The poetry is the creation of a peson, not a persona. Some of Rose's prose is indigestible--mainly fare for the Plath postgraduate.An important book, out of print, not in the library, so pleased to get a copy quickly and for a fair price