The first study devoted to Sylvia Plath's fiction covering The Bell Jar and all of her published and unpublished short stories drawing extensively on archival material.

The first fully researched study to cover all of Sylvia Plath's fiction.

'With tenacity and clear-eyed scholarly authority, Luke Ferretter has gone into the archive and emerged with a systematic sourcebook for readers of Sylvia Plath's fiction...Adeptly drawing on and adding to the body of recent criticism that has enlarged our sense of the scope and complexity of Plath's creativity, this is a very valuable book.'

Langdon Hammer, Professor of English and American Studies, Yale University

'Just as the unabridged Journals reveal Sylvia Plath's ferocious drive and dedication to the written word, Sylvia Plath's Fiction: A Critical Study documents her struggle during the repressive 1950s to find the biting, sardonic prose voice of The Bell Jar. Luke Ferretter brilliantly traces Plath's apprenticeship from the age of thirteen to thirty, uncovering many unpublished short stories along the way in American archives. Every scholar of Sylvia Plath needs to read Luke Ferretter's ground-breaking work, the first serious examination of the riveting prose voice of one of the 20th century's most electrifying poets.'

Karen V. Kukil, Associate Curator of Special Collections, Smith College

As well as poetry, Plath wrote fiction throughout her life. She wrote novels before and after The Bell Jar, as well as women's magazine romances, New Yorker stories, comedy, social criticism, autobiography, teenage fiction and science fiction. Discussing all these novels and stories, Ferretter analyses Plath's influences as a fiction writer, the relationships between her poetry and fiction, the political views she expresses in her fiction, and devotes two chapters to the central concern of her novels and stories, the roles of women in contemporary society.