The Self-Fashioned Writer’s “Confession”

Abstract This article brings together two literary icons of personal “confessional” writing, Sylvia Plath and Margery Kempe, to examine—among their other uncanny transhistorical similarities—the way in which both women consciously self-fashioned their personhoods and their afterlives as writers and public figures. It also examines the ethically and affectively complicated dynamics of archival engagement with such fraught figures, reflecting on the author’s own relationship to Plath and the way it has shaped her training as a literary academic. Ultimately, she sees Plath and Kempe as women who dared to “[think their] own story might be meaningful” by actively shaping themselves with the texts they were reading; this not only invites devoted readers to do the same but also suggests that a more confessional mode of criticism may actually be a more ethical way of encountering archives and ethically fraught writers.