Special Collections > Mortimer Rare Book Collection > Online Exhibits > Her Novels Make Mine Possible > Case 2: The Waves and "Lady Lazarus"
Her Novels Make Mine Possible
The Influence of Virginia Woolf on Sylvia Plath
Case 2: The Waves and "Lady Lazarus"
| Image: 1 page Sylvia Plath. Cape Cod Journal: typescript, 17 July 1957. |
Responding to The Waves in her journal, Plath was initially “disturbed” and “almost angered” with Woolf’s “endless sun, waves, birds, and the strange unevenness of description,” complaining that she placed “a heavy, ungainly, ugly sentence next to a fluent, pure, running one.” At the end of the novel, however, Plath became overwhelmed with “the hair-raising fineness of the last 50 pages”:
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| In this passage from The Waves, Bernard’s desire for the “illumination of other people’s eyes” mirrors a statement that Plath wrote in her journal a year later: “Reading, studying, ‘making your own mind’ all by oneself is just not my best way. I need the reality of other people, work, to fulfill myself.” In the poetic language of The Waves, Woolf’s six main characters contemplate their role in each stage of life. | Image: book spread Virginia Woolf. The Waves. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. Uniform edition, eighth impression. |
In “Lady Lazarus,” Plath’s persona systematically self-destructs each decade. Plath’s first draft of the poem, composed in October of 1962, reveals a heightened sense of audience, complete with an excised mob and executioner.
Image: 6 pages
Sylvia Plath. “Lady Lazarus”: holograph, 1962.
| Image:1 page Sylvia Plath. Cape Cod Journal: typescript, 20 July 1957. |
After returning to the United States from Cambridge, England, in 1957, Plath read three novels by Virginia Woolf in one week. While she did not note the first novel, Plath recorded in her journal on 17 July 1957 having “underlined & underlined” her copy of The Waves. Soon after, Plath wrote to her mother that she was “turning to Virginia Woolf’s next novel,” and wrote in her journal on 18 July that “the Woolf sting in Jacob’s Room [was] put off.” Two days later, Plath wrote in her journal, “Virginia Woolf helps. Her novels make mine possible: I find myself describing: episodes: you don’t have to follow your Judith Greenwood to breakfast, lunch, dinner, or tell about her train rides, unless the flash forwards her, reveals her. Make her enigmatic.” |
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Sylvia Plath Collection
Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College
