I hadn't realized until recently … that Sylvia Plath had become something of a heroine of the feminist movement. The myth being, as I understood it, that here was a girl with tremendous literary gifts who married, had two children, and then, hopelessly burdened and appalled by her bleak domestic situation, finally put her head in the oven, turned on the gas, and died…. But though the cause is just, Sylvia Plath is simply no heroine for this or any other movement. Because, alas, that girl was dead from the beginning, passionately, madly in love with death. And if she did succeed in killing herself in the kitchen after having married and having had those two babies, it was just that she had failed other times….

[What] chilled the heart was that it had turned out to be all a facade—the sweetness, the modesty, the golden prettiness, the...