Quote by Sylvia Plath: “I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.”

A mirror simply shows what is there — it has no opinion, no agenda, no mercy. Plath uses the mirror's cold objectivity as a way of exploring how brutal pure truth can be when stripped of all the softening we normally wrap around reality. It's about the discomfort of seeing yourself clearly.

Mirror was written in 1961 and published in The New Yorker, then collected in Plath's posthumous volume Crossing the Water. It was written during her most intensive creative period, when she was also caring for her first child and managing a deteriorating marriage to Ted Hughes.

American poet and novelist whose confessional poetry and semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar explored mental illness, identity, and the suffocating expectations placed on women in mid-twentieth-century America. Her posthumously published collections, including Ariel, are among the most powerful in postwar American literature.