A Closer Look at the Author of A Closer Look at Ariel: A Memory of Sylvia Plath

         I just finished rereading A Closer Look at Ariel: A Memory of Sylvia Plath after many years of maturing as a writer myself, and I have to say that this time around, Nancy Hunter Steiner came across to me as an astonishingly good writer -- as skilled in her own non-fiction writing as Plath — a poet of surpassing brilliance — was. 

I'd like to know if Steiner wrote other books that I could track down and read. It seems to me a shame — a truly unjust literary loss — that she's not remembered more as a writer of consummate ability. 

     As I see it, A Closer Look at Ariel was breathtakingly well written, not just for its writerly sophistication but for its powerful insights into Plath, with whom she lived at Smith College for two years before Plath committed suicide at the age of 29. Steiner, whose work we hear very little about today, was also a terrible loss to the world of fiction and poetry, merely by virtue of our many decades of inattention to her. 

Plath’s highly praised novel, The Bell Jar, helps us understand just how great were her gifts as a writer. And along with A Closer Look at Ariel, it provides us with a brutally honest look at how her ways of thinking, her emotional fragility, and her self-destructive behaviors finally led her to such a tragic, untimely death. 

                       — Ross Alan Bachelder  3/22/21