"The life and work of Sylvia Plath has taken on the proportions of legend. Educated at Smith, Plath had a conflicted relationship with her mother. She married the poet Ted Hughes and plunged into the sturm und drang of literary celebrity. Her poems were fought over, rejected--and ultimately embraced by readers everywhere. At age thirty she committed suicide. Ariel, a collection of poems she wrote at white-hot speed during her final months, became...