generally, the best answer to the question of what you should do, when you have a choice, is what you want to do.
I remember in my first year at uni - my second go at uni - agonising over which essay I should choose, because I'd never been in that situation before where you have a choice about what question to answer. So, I booked some time with my tutor to get some advice, and her advice was to do the one that I wanted to do - the one that I found the most interesting. When she put it like that, it was obvious to me. I did the essay about Frankenstein.
I've been interested in Frankenstein ever since, just as I've been interested in the life and work of Emily Brontё, and George Eliot since I first encountered them.
Speaking of great women writers, I bought the e-book version of a new biography of Sylvia Plath - RED COMET: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (2020) by Heather Clark - which looks absolutely superb.
My interest in Sylvia Plath is kind of different from the others I mentioned. Shelley's, Brontë's and Eliot's novels are among my favourite novels - actually, they pretty much constitute the list of my favourite novels.
but, even though I enjoy studying poetry, I don't take to it naturally like I do to the novel. Emily Brontё, unlike her sisters, was a poet of considerable stature...but I don't really know any better. I just know that I was captivated by Wuthering Heights, which led me to also study her poetry and read numerous biographies, and that, the further I went, the more I was captivated by the complete picture - of a life, the life of a writer. There's really a kind of integrity between Emily Brontë's life - her personality and character - and her work.
With Plath....I've read her novel, The Bell Jar, which was intense, profound, deep, eloquent, but (for me) a bit too raw for comfort. So, that was my first encounter with her. and then I heard about her poetry, but I've never actually studied it. Now that I'm reading this biography, I'm going to buy an edition of her poems.
but what really got my attention is her letters and journals. I went in to a bookshop a few years ago, not necessarily intending to buy anything, and I picked up a copy of The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000) and just started reading parts of it.....I thought, this is exquisite...it was like getting to sample a range of delicious foods. So, then I bought that book, and later I bought Letters Home (1976), which is quite a large selection of Sylvia's letters, selected and edited, with commentary, by Sylvia's mother - Aurelia Schober Plath - to whom most of the letters were written. Recently, her complete letters have been published, in 2 separate volumes.
One of the things I really like so far about RED COMET is the attention it gives to the literary tradition in which Sylvia Plath was steeped and which she helped to shape...from Chaucer on, because that's one of my interests /// literary tradition, the canon. That was one of the appeals of Sylvia's journals for me - that cognisance of literary tradition, and her desire to read and study rich, difficult books, and to engage with them in her own creative work.
It's interesting - that intersection of secular canonicity and personal literary expression. It's interesting to think about what sense writers had/ have of the literary merit of their own work. It's a complicated issue.
Emily Dickinson only published 10 of her 1,800 or so poems during her life, but, based on those poems, published after her death, she is now regarded as one of the giants of American poetry in the 19th century.
A couple of interesting things I discovered from wikipedia:
- Her biggest literary influence was Shakespeare
- One of her favourite poems was Emily Brontë's, 'No Coward Soul is Mine'
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