This project is dedicated to Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton who were not just the victims of their histories as they've come to be known. No feminism gain from seeing women solely as either victims or survivors. To examine and see that both these women by being poets were able to take psychic risks throughout their life is more important than the fact of their deaths.
"Neither Sexton nor Plath lived to see the birth of second- wave feminism. It is tempting, and not wholly inappropriate, to think that if they had enjoyed the advantage of feminist insight and solidarity they might both have been alive today. Certainly, their anguish as women was rooted in the perils of domesticity and child- rearing, which would become the target of that wave of feminism’s opening and loudest complaint, and for which they were amongst the first to craft the poetic language, to give it voice. But that was not all. Sexton was an emotional hurricane. At the centre of hurricane there is a tale of domestic abuse- by her father, possibly by her beloved aunt, later of her own daughter. As this story migrates across genders and generations, there is no neat version to be told. It swallows up too many people, regurgitates through Sexton’s life and writing (such regurgitation is of course recognised today as the hallmark of abuse). Plath, for her part, felt herself trapped by a desire which drowned her in its intensity and left her stranded on the far shore of domestic ideal which was travesty of her own fierce and expansive imaginative reach."
Jacqueline Rose
