This episode is about women’s writing in the archive and women’s role as record-keepers in both families and institutions.

We talk to Jennifer Douglas about Sylvia Plath and her archives. One of the most famous writers of the twentieth century, Plath is best known for her confessional poetry.

The tragic elements of her life story, particularly her death by suicide, can at times overshadow her literary achievements. In one of her best-known poems, “Lady Lazarus,” the speaker, whom readers tend to associate closely with Plath, claims:

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.   
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.   
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

Plath’s mother, Aurelia, is often seen as a meddlesome presence in Plath’s archive, wishing to present a slanted portrait of Sylvia Plath as a dutiful daughter. Drawing from her years of research on Plath and her personal experience of losing a daughter, Douglas argues for a reading of Plath’s archives, annotated in Aurelia’s hand, as ‘grief work,’ a testament of a mother’s grief for her beloved daughter.

While archives are traditionally imagined to be collections of material coalescing organically, Douglas highlights the strategic and subjective elements of their creation. She asks us to consider the active role that many people, from the family members who inherit the records, to the archivists who process the collections, play in shaping collections. These active agents in the archive are often women, given that librarianship is a feminized profession, and as we discuss, women from medieval times to the present are often the record keepers of the family. We consider the possibility that the archive itself is a form of life writing.