This book makes a useful addition to the ever-growing body of Plath criticism. Plath wrote remarkable poems, and her induction in November 2010 to the American Poets' Corner in the New York Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine was another step towards the fulfilment of her 1958 wish to be the “Poetess of America.” But prose fiction was no less central to her identity as a writer, an identity that took shape in the final years at Smith College. This manifested itself partly as a desire to appear in the “slicks,” those prestigious magazines like the New Yorker which printed short stories by J. D. Salinger and Mavis Gallant, and partly as a desire to earn an income from creative writing. By focussing on the short stories as much as on The Bell Jar Luke Ferretter gives attention to aspects of her prose fiction often treated as secondary, or peripheral.

Ferretter goes right back to the beginning, and discusses the surviving stories Plath wrote at school in the late 1940s when she was in her mid-teens. He argues, not always convincingly, that they anticipate important symbols and gender issues noticeable in the later stories of the 1950s. There is a surprisingly large number of such stories and Ferretter identifies each phase, such as the Smith College stories of 1950–53; the more mature, post-suicide-attempt Smith College stories of 1954–55; and the Cambridge stories of 1956–57. The achievement of this part of the book is in providing a comprehensive summary and record of all the surviving fiction. In places he covers familiar territory, but elsewhere breaks fresh ground. The subject of Plath's literary influences and contexts (Virginia Woolf, New Yorker fiction) has been well rehearsed, but Ferretter has clearly carried out detailed research into the women's magazines and “breakdown” fiction by women Plath was reading and noting. He shows us how frequently Hughes provided Plath with narrative situations and plots, but points out that in the end Plath made use of none of them. Less persuasive are the paragraphs in which claims are made for the specific influence of New Yorker contributors Jean Stafford and Sylvia Townsend Warner.

The discussion of the relationship between prose and verse is by far the most interesting. Here Ferretter reads the short stories alongside the poetry Plath was writing in the same year, and this juxtaposition is sometimes revealing. The Yaddo breakthrough, for example, which ended the poetry writing block Plath experienced in Boston in 1958–59, occurred when Plath confronted issues in her poetry she had already explored in her short stories. This freshness of analysis is not maintained. The chapters on gender and society in The Bell Jar, and in the short stories, cover familiar ground, and though I would be expected to applaud (and do) the chapter on the politics of Plath's fiction I was surprised not to see even a passing footnote reference to “The Political Education of Sylvia Plath,” an essay which seems relevant here.

The shortcomings can be frustrating. The absence of any final section offering a review and assessment of Plath's fiction is but one of these frustrations. Another is the sometimes strange structure, as when in chapter 3 the comments on Plath growing up in World War II follow the discussion of the Cold War fiction. In embedding Plath's fiction in its contemporary political and material culture, the approach promised much. In the end I was left wishing for more, including Ferretter's view on just how good a prose fiction writer Plath really is.