Anne Stevenson's elegy ‘Letter to Sylvia Plath’ (1988) is a curious performance. It hovers between conventional pastoral elegy, with its summoning of the natural forces of ‘English springs’ – the Grantchester willows, the Cam, the bull thrush shouting from the thicket – and rather cool assess ment of Plath's poetic forces, as though sitting in judgement on the fragile and ferocious intensities of the dead poet's art. Clearly issuing in part from a complex sense of relief at the release from the grip of Plath's life story, after the agon of Stevenson's controversial biog raphy, Bitter Fame (1989), the poem is streaked through with both admira tion for ‘the fiercest poet of our time’, and an admonitory rhetoric that amounts to subdued rebuke, some lines inviting a be littling, even patronising tone (‘Poor Sylvia, could you not have been / a little smaller than a queen?’) in the tradition of critical elegies. Bitter Fame had been similarly bifold, at once celebratory of the poems with its lovely close readings, and moralising against Plath's surrender to her own temptations, her selfishness, her panicky sense of mission. The elegiac gesture in ‘Letter to Sylvia Plath’ is something of a broken one, for the reasons that the biography falls short: because the relationship with Plath was too close for comfort, a doubling of impulses in Stevenson that her poetics and critical sense could not quite control. But the very failure, I would argue, reveals something else: a charged engagement with a cluster of interrelated ideas: the double, the social forms of the maternal imago, the struggle for fame, which informs much of Stevenson's work as it did Plath's. The engagement with the sinister female ‘sister’, the life-and-death wrestling with the mother within, and the contest for fame's afterlife within the predominantly male domain of poetry – these are looming presences in both poets’ work. With these consonances in mind, I think it is possible to read both Bitter Fame and the Plath elegies (including ‘Hot Wind, Hard Rain’ and ‘Nightmares, Daymoths’) in ways which partly redeem the shortcomings of the biographical project, and which establish the grounds for entertaining a new form of elegy that works as a means of connection between two female poets, rewriting by this means the masculinist pastoral elegy.