Afterword

The Afterword examines publications and disclosures made about the connection between A. Alvarez and Sylvia Plath since the first publication of The Alvarez Generation. Its own look at the biographical details of personal relationship between the two writers details the timing of their meetings and the poems Plath recited at them. The Afterword also weighs up the biographical evidence for a possible sexual liaison between Alvarez and Plath, including the testimony of Olwyn Hughes regarding Plath’s journals cited by Ted Hughes’s biographer Jonathan Bate, and settles the question by adding new biographical evidence of its own. The Afterword then reconsiders ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ in relation to questions of sex and sexual politics, and re-evaluates Alvarez’s presentations of possible connections between Plath’s poetry and her suicide.