structural:reformatting
Portrayals in media

Plath's voice is heard in a BBC documentary about her life, recorded in London in late 1962. Of the BBC recording Elizabeth Hardwick wrote:

I have never before learned anything from a poetic reading, unless the clothes, the beard, the girls, the poor or good condition of the poet can be considered a kind of knowledge. But I was taken aback by Sylvia Plath's reading. It was not anything like I could have imagined. Not a trace of the modest, retreating, humorous Worcester, Massachusetts, of Elizabeth Bishop; nothing of the swallowed plain Pennsylvania of Marianne Moore. Instead these bitter poems—"Daddy", "Lady Lazarus", "The Applicant", "Fever 103°"—were beautifully read, projected in full-throated, plump, diction-perfect, Englishy, mesmerizing cadences, all round and rapid, and paced and spaced. Poor recessive Massachusetts had been erased. "I have done it again!" Clearly, perfectly, staring you down. She seemed to be standing at a banquet like Timon, crying, "Uncover, dogs, and lap!"

Gwyneth Paltrow portrayed Plath in the biopic Sylvia (2003). Elizabeth Sigmund, who was friends with both Plath and Hughes, criticized the movie for depicting Sylvia as "a permanent depressive and a possessive person", but she conceded that "the film has an atmosphere towards the end of her life which is heartbreaking in its accuracy". Frieda Hughes, who was only two years old when she lost her mother, was angered by the making of entertainment featuring her parents' troubled marriage and her mother's death. She accused the "peanut crunching" public of wanting to be titillated by her family's tragedies. In 2003, Frieda reacted to the situation in the poem "My Mother", first published in Tatler:

Now they want to make a film For anyone lacking the ability To imagine the body, head in oven, Orphaning children... they think I should give them my mother's words To fill the mouth of their monster, Their Sylvia Suicide Doll