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Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
The first biography of this great and tragic poet that takes advantage of a wealth of new material, this is an unusually balanced, comprehensive and definitive life of Sylvia Plath.
*A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH AND THE TIMES*
Determined not to read Plath's work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark presents new materials about Plath's scientist father, her juvenile writings, and her psychiatric treatment, and evokes a culture in transition in the mid-twentieth century, in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, as she explores Sylvia's world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her conflicted ties to her well-meaning, widowed mother; her troubles at the hands of an unenlightened mental-health industry; and her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, a true marriage of minds that would change the course of poetry in English.
Clark's clear-eyed sympathy for Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath's suicide promotes a deeper understanding of her final days, with their outpouring of first-rate poems. Along with illuminating readings of the poems themselves, Clark's meticulous, compassionate research brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women poets the world over.
*A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH AND THE TIMES*
Determined not to read Plath's work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark presents new materials about Plath's scientist father, her juvenile writings, and her psychiatric treatment, and evokes a culture in transition in the mid-twentieth century, in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, as she explores Sylvia's world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her conflicted ties to her well-meaning, widowed mother; her troubles at the hands of an unenlightened mental-health industry; and her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, a true marriage of minds that would change the course of poetry in English.
Clark's clear-eyed sympathy for Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath's suicide promotes a deeper understanding of her final days, with their outpouring of first-rate poems. Along with illuminating readings of the poems themselves, Clark's meticulous, compassionate research brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women poets the world over.
1154 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 2020
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December 18, 2020
Unlike many of the other biographies, memoirs and books on Plath, this one has no overriding theory which it's pushing: instead, Clark has crafted something that returns meticulously to the multiple sources including Plath's letters, journals, commentaries and introductions, as well as those of people close to her during her short life, and has additionally conducted interviews as well as tracking down the previous interviews that have been archived. The result is the most detailed and comprehensive biography I have read of Plath - and is one which doesn't see her life as teleological, leading inevitably and unwaveringly to that taped up kitchen and the gas oven.
Instead, Clark gives us a Plath who is dazzling in her multiple selves: complex, contradictory, mercurial, and the subject of many pressures from the public and political to the most intimate and personal. It's admirable, too, that Clark challenges the idea of Plath's poetry as barely-disguised autobiography; she redefines 'confessional' in literary terms and refocuses us on how Plath herself saw her writing: as using personal experience to explore and articulate wider social and cultural truths. Even a volume like Ariel encompasses variant voices from the tender tones of maternity, albeit crushed by fear and frustration, to the raging red of 'Lady Lazarus' and the exhilarating transcendence of 'Ariel'.
This is long (it's worth noting that the text ends at around p.947, the rest is references, notes and index), but never less that fascinating; and Clarke treads that delicate line between full disclosure and prurience.
Perceptive, sympathetic, balanced and with all the requisite scholarly apparatus, this will be the standard academic life of Plath for some time to come. A fascinating read which does full justice to the troubled, multiplicitous, stunningly talented Plath.
Instead, Clark gives us a Plath who is dazzling in her multiple selves: complex, contradictory, mercurial, and the subject of many pressures from the public and political to the most intimate and personal. It's admirable, too, that Clark challenges the idea of Plath's poetry as barely-disguised autobiography; she redefines 'confessional' in literary terms and refocuses us on how Plath herself saw her writing: as using personal experience to explore and articulate wider social and cultural truths. Even a volume like Ariel encompasses variant voices from the tender tones of maternity, albeit crushed by fear and frustration, to the raging red of 'Lady Lazarus' and the exhilarating transcendence of 'Ariel'.
This is long (it's worth noting that the text ends at around p.947, the rest is references, notes and index), but never less that fascinating; and Clarke treads that delicate line between full disclosure and prurience.
Perceptive, sympathetic, balanced and with all the requisite scholarly apparatus, this will be the standard academic life of Plath for some time to come. A fascinating read which does full justice to the troubled, multiplicitous, stunningly talented Plath.
January 5, 2021
Absolutely incredible. My review is on Booktube!
July 8, 2020
This is the first biography of Plath that I’ve read and I was impressed by its comprehensiveness as well as the unbiased approach regarding her artistic development, her work, and her marriage. My second reaction was to ask myself how, in my arrogance, did I deign to make such an assumption since I hadn’t read any other Plath biographies. In order to address both my arrogance and ignorance, I made a point of reading two other Plath biographies. Also, I re-read her poetry but not the Bell Jar. Based upon this additional reading, I stand by my initial impressions. I’ve yet to read ROUGH MAGIC and METHOD AND MADNESS but I shall when my Plath weariness abates.
Clark firmly places Plath as a product of not only her innate intelligence but of the additional conflicts present in her life both cultural and familial. The death of her father loomed large in her life as well as her mother’s tendency to cloyingly nurture her. This is not to neglect mentioning her marriage to poet Ted Hughes and her struggle to be the perfect wife and mother while trying to find time for her own work. Most importantly, Plath’s life stands on its own rather than being depicted as a relentless march to her suicide. Is Plath a brilliant, iconic poet? Possibly. Is this a biography of empathy, intelligence and deep research? Definitely.
Clark firmly places Plath as a product of not only her innate intelligence but of the additional conflicts present in her life both cultural and familial. The death of her father loomed large in her life as well as her mother’s tendency to cloyingly nurture her. This is not to neglect mentioning her marriage to poet Ted Hughes and her struggle to be the perfect wife and mother while trying to find time for her own work. Most importantly, Plath’s life stands on its own rather than being depicted as a relentless march to her suicide. Is Plath a brilliant, iconic poet? Possibly. Is this a biography of empathy, intelligence and deep research? Definitely.
October 11, 2023
“...if we could be clairvoyant and see the date of our own doom, the bloodclot in the vein of our existence - how differently we might proportion our time” -Sylvia Plath
A fascinating and exhaustively researched disquisition that sidesteps the mythos and fleshes out Sylvia Plath like never before. Doggedly in pursuit of the truth, Heather Clark paints a portrait of Plath that is unfiltered but respectful. In the end I came to see SP for what she truly was, a brilliant poet and writer battling both misogyny and mental illness while juggling the demands of motherhood and the devastating fallout of an unfaithful husband. This is eleven hundred pages of heart and heartbreak. 5 stars.
A fascinating and exhaustively researched disquisition that sidesteps the mythos and fleshes out Sylvia Plath like never before. Doggedly in pursuit of the truth, Heather Clark paints a portrait of Plath that is unfiltered but respectful. In the end I came to see SP for what she truly was, a brilliant poet and writer battling both misogyny and mental illness while juggling the demands of motherhood and the devastating fallout of an unfaithful husband. This is eleven hundred pages of heart and heartbreak. 5 stars.
December 10, 2022
Wow!
Audiobook….read by Laura Clark
…..45 hours and 27 minutes
Incredibly fascinating….
…..really phenomenal !!!!
Audiobook….read by Laura Clark
…..45 hours and 27 minutes
Incredibly fascinating….
…..really phenomenal !!!!
December 31, 2021
I think many lovers of women’s literature, and literature generally, may remember exactly where they were when they first heard how Sylvia Plath (and for that matter, Virginia Woolf) died.
Especially as most of us are quite young when first exposed to writings by these wonderful and groundbreaking authors, which remain favorites of mine to this day.
It’s overwhelmingly sad to be struck by their genius for the very first time and then to learn of the great suffering and pain they experienced while creating their beautiful and enduring art.
Year’s-end is an appropriate time to reflect on good decisions we’ve made for ourselves, and reading this book was one for me. I wasn’t sure about tackling a book of this length, especially after catching a glimpse of the actual book in the library, where the whole of it could hardly fit in the gap between the top of my face mask and the brim of my baseball cap. Or, after downloading the audio and seeing that it represented two straight days of listening 24/7.
I also pondered the usual questions about the utility of reading once again about an oft-told and familiar story (or so I thought) given the huge number of Plath bios out there already.
Turns out I needn’t have worried about any of this at all. This book was spectacular and well worth all the time spent on it, and more. Which didn’t end up being much time at all, because it was also about as unputdownable as a book of this stripe can be, and I flew straight through it - especially once reaching the final sad years of her life.
As you may know, turns out many of the previous Plath bios have been fraught and problematic in one way or another, or missing key pieces for one reason or another. Here, Heather Clark meticulously cobbles together a narrative crafted primarily of information and details drawn directly from an astounding array of primary source materials, many of which have never before been considered and incorporated together into a Plath bio: letters, interviews, recordings, journals, marginalia, juvenalia, official records, and other plunderings of various international archives.
These resources contain perspectives not just from Plath and Ted Hughes themselves, but from their family, friends, associates, neighbors, colleagues, employers, employees, teachers, students, doctors and other care providers, lovers, and more. (In fact the last couple hundred pages of the book consist of the copious notes. So it’s really “ only” about 800-900 pages long.)
The result is that you really do come away with a far more enlivened, multifaceted vision of Plath as a real and complex human being, with all the ambivalence and mixed feelings and impressions one can and should have toward another human being.
That she was probably most definitely a supremely intelligent and sensitive and talented and driven and ambitious and hardworking actual genius is well substantiated and never really in doubt. I had no idea, though, of things like the extent of her longstanding passionate and tempestuous love life, and that she was often head over heels for some boy, sex-positive well before her time, and overall quite the heartthrob and sometimes heartbreaker. I felt like I needed to fetch the pins and yarn and a corkboard at one point to track her many beaux from high school on.
And although I knew about the ill-administered shock treatments and the profound psychological damage they wrought, nor did I know of the overall adverse influence of poor medical and mental health provision, and especially psychopharmacology, throughout her life. She was continuously sick with a variety of illnesses, allergies and injuries, had a perpetual sinus infection, was seemingly always on antibiotics, and was chronically prescribed so very many of the since-restricted “mothers’ little helpers” and sleeping pills that this cannot help but shed great light on her untimely end.
It’s hard to believe this weird cocktail of medications (some known to be interactive/contraindicated, and/or to which she was allergic) was not largely culpable in her tragic demise - regardless of what other physical and mental health diagnoses she may have accurately had. (And I think this book illuminates how severe maternal mental health issues were also clearly an unrecognized and improperly treated challenge as well.)
It’s also completely amazing to read a detailed account of how Plath - and yes, Hughes - as starving students (and in Plath’s case, long before) just up and decided to make a living doing poetry and other writings, and then basically just sat right down asses to chairs and somehow executed that plan successfully and relatively efficiently (with fucking fountain pens and ink! and eventually a typewriter!), garnering awards and traveling all over the world and USA as a result.
They were van life and gig economy way before their time. They had these hippie bohemian Romantic lives that rival anything people you might think of first, like Coleridge or Kerouac, did.
It also struck me just how SO SO SO YOUNG they were when they accomplished all this. (In Sylvia’s case - accomplished everything for which we know her. Again: she was only just a few months past 30 when she died.) I feel like I basically was fully useless until at least age 27. Sylvia was working her butt off and winning all the prizes in everything since, like, birth.
Also, that these two wrote SO prodigiously and seemed to enjoy it so much - the sheer volume of their diaries and letters (just the bits excerpted in this book, even) is astounding. This seems like such a lost way of life now - it really felt more like reading about a different universe altogether as opposed to just a different place in time. Although Sylvia would have rocked Twitter today, IMHO.
I don’t want to say too much about Ted Hughes in this review because that’s probably too predictable and facile, and I know he has his fans. But I will say that I do think Clark went fairly strenuously out of her way to be fair to him, especially around his actual literary talent as opposed to his personality or spousal skills.
Girl Code-wise, I obviously wasn’t Ted’s #1 Fan to start with, so I was also determined to try to give Clark’s equitable and nonjudgmental approach a go myself going in to this book. That experiment didn’t necessarily yield any shocking new outcomes. I certainly didn’t end up liking him any more, and I think it would have been a Very Bad Idea to swipe right on that - I’ll leave it mostly there.
His own words (in his letters and journals, or as recalled by others - including those aside from Sylvia) are most damning: it seems pretty clear he had a full-on Fire Engine Red Ferrari-caliber early-midlife crisis shortly after they had their second child (the first was still barely a toddler) and decided that marriage was the deepest circle of hell and a most base and foul infringement on his essential human rights and needs, and instead he wanted to be l, as I sputtered to a friend, “a world-wandering playboy poet or something!” (My friend said, is that a thing?)
Especially knowing what postnatal mental health concerns were likely impacting Sylvia at the time, it was heartbreaking to read some of his critical and cruel actions and remarks - seems like he certainly wasn’t shy about showing off his non-consented-to extramarital romantic relations - and to see how Sylvia then starts describing herself in writing as an ugly old undesirable matronly “hag” (at not quite 30) and things like that.
However, as many of you know and as described in the book, Hughes’s life was subsequently rocked by multiple tragedies, including three more deaths of immediate family, aside from Sylvia, by suicide or murder-suicide, so this seems punishment enough.
So yes - the book was sad, super sad. But so so well worth reading. It’s won all the laurels, so you really don’t need me to tell you how great it is. I cannot imagine a more authoritative work on Plath. This is everything a literary bio should be. I hope Sylvia, the ultimate perfectionist herself, would have approved of such effort. It’s always been devastating - and after reading this book, even more so - to imagine and be deprived of all she could have gone on to accomplish and put into the world.
Especially as most of us are quite young when first exposed to writings by these wonderful and groundbreaking authors, which remain favorites of mine to this day.
It’s overwhelmingly sad to be struck by their genius for the very first time and then to learn of the great suffering and pain they experienced while creating their beautiful and enduring art.
Year’s-end is an appropriate time to reflect on good decisions we’ve made for ourselves, and reading this book was one for me. I wasn’t sure about tackling a book of this length, especially after catching a glimpse of the actual book in the library, where the whole of it could hardly fit in the gap between the top of my face mask and the brim of my baseball cap. Or, after downloading the audio and seeing that it represented two straight days of listening 24/7.
I also pondered the usual questions about the utility of reading once again about an oft-told and familiar story (or so I thought) given the huge number of Plath bios out there already.
Turns out I needn’t have worried about any of this at all. This book was spectacular and well worth all the time spent on it, and more. Which didn’t end up being much time at all, because it was also about as unputdownable as a book of this stripe can be, and I flew straight through it - especially once reaching the final sad years of her life.
As you may know, turns out many of the previous Plath bios have been fraught and problematic in one way or another, or missing key pieces for one reason or another. Here, Heather Clark meticulously cobbles together a narrative crafted primarily of information and details drawn directly from an astounding array of primary source materials, many of which have never before been considered and incorporated together into a Plath bio: letters, interviews, recordings, journals, marginalia, juvenalia, official records, and other plunderings of various international archives.
These resources contain perspectives not just from Plath and Ted Hughes themselves, but from their family, friends, associates, neighbors, colleagues, employers, employees, teachers, students, doctors and other care providers, lovers, and more. (In fact the last couple hundred pages of the book consist of the copious notes. So it’s really “ only” about 800-900 pages long.)
The result is that you really do come away with a far more enlivened, multifaceted vision of Plath as a real and complex human being, with all the ambivalence and mixed feelings and impressions one can and should have toward another human being.
That she was probably most definitely a supremely intelligent and sensitive and talented and driven and ambitious and hardworking actual genius is well substantiated and never really in doubt. I had no idea, though, of things like the extent of her longstanding passionate and tempestuous love life, and that she was often head over heels for some boy, sex-positive well before her time, and overall quite the heartthrob and sometimes heartbreaker. I felt like I needed to fetch the pins and yarn and a corkboard at one point to track her many beaux from high school on.
And although I knew about the ill-administered shock treatments and the profound psychological damage they wrought, nor did I know of the overall adverse influence of poor medical and mental health provision, and especially psychopharmacology, throughout her life. She was continuously sick with a variety of illnesses, allergies and injuries, had a perpetual sinus infection, was seemingly always on antibiotics, and was chronically prescribed so very many of the since-restricted “mothers’ little helpers” and sleeping pills that this cannot help but shed great light on her untimely end.
It’s hard to believe this weird cocktail of medications (some known to be interactive/contraindicated, and/or to which she was allergic) was not largely culpable in her tragic demise - regardless of what other physical and mental health diagnoses she may have accurately had. (And I think this book illuminates how severe maternal mental health issues were also clearly an unrecognized and improperly treated challenge as well.)
It’s also completely amazing to read a detailed account of how Plath - and yes, Hughes - as starving students (and in Plath’s case, long before) just up and decided to make a living doing poetry and other writings, and then basically just sat right down asses to chairs and somehow executed that plan successfully and relatively efficiently (with fucking fountain pens and ink! and eventually a typewriter!), garnering awards and traveling all over the world and USA as a result.
They were van life and gig economy way before their time. They had these hippie bohemian Romantic lives that rival anything people you might think of first, like Coleridge or Kerouac, did.
It also struck me just how SO SO SO YOUNG they were when they accomplished all this. (In Sylvia’s case - accomplished everything for which we know her. Again: she was only just a few months past 30 when she died.) I feel like I basically was fully useless until at least age 27. Sylvia was working her butt off and winning all the prizes in everything since, like, birth.
Also, that these two wrote SO prodigiously and seemed to enjoy it so much - the sheer volume of their diaries and letters (just the bits excerpted in this book, even) is astounding. This seems like such a lost way of life now - it really felt more like reading about a different universe altogether as opposed to just a different place in time. Although Sylvia would have rocked Twitter today, IMHO.
I don’t want to say too much about Ted Hughes in this review because that’s probably too predictable and facile, and I know he has his fans. But I will say that I do think Clark went fairly strenuously out of her way to be fair to him, especially around his actual literary talent as opposed to his personality or spousal skills.
Girl Code-wise, I obviously wasn’t Ted’s #1 Fan to start with, so I was also determined to try to give Clark’s equitable and nonjudgmental approach a go myself going in to this book. That experiment didn’t necessarily yield any shocking new outcomes. I certainly didn’t end up liking him any more, and I think it would have been a Very Bad Idea to swipe right on that - I’ll leave it mostly there.
His own words (in his letters and journals, or as recalled by others - including those aside from Sylvia) are most damning: it seems pretty clear he had a full-on Fire Engine Red Ferrari-caliber early-midlife crisis shortly after they had their second child (the first was still barely a toddler) and decided that marriage was the deepest circle of hell and a most base and foul infringement on his essential human rights and needs, and instead he wanted to be l, as I sputtered to a friend, “a world-wandering playboy poet or something!” (My friend said, is that a thing?)
Especially knowing what postnatal mental health concerns were likely impacting Sylvia at the time, it was heartbreaking to read some of his critical and cruel actions and remarks - seems like he certainly wasn’t shy about showing off his non-consented-to extramarital romantic relations - and to see how Sylvia then starts describing herself in writing as an ugly old undesirable matronly “hag” (at not quite 30) and things like that.
However, as many of you know and as described in the book, Hughes’s life was subsequently rocked by multiple tragedies, including three more deaths of immediate family, aside from Sylvia, by suicide or murder-suicide, so this seems punishment enough.
So yes - the book was sad, super sad. But so so well worth reading. It’s won all the laurels, so you really don’t need me to tell you how great it is. I cannot imagine a more authoritative work on Plath. This is everything a literary bio should be. I hope Sylvia, the ultimate perfectionist herself, would have approved of such effort. It’s always been devastating - and after reading this book, even more so - to imagine and be deprived of all she could have gone on to accomplish and put into the world.
January 5, 2024
Sylvia Plath once said something to the effect of "It will take a whole row of books to understand me." (And she often had prophesying moments like that. Indeed, her husband, Ted Hughes considered her to be clairvoyant.)
I first read Plath when I was eighteen and the timing felt perfect because Syvia was at the same age at the beginning of her journal. I could close my eyes and see the world she was describing perfectly. I could even feel what the evening sky smelled like.
I ended up reading everything I could about her. And what really struck me was how unkind her biographers were. Clark's biography is the first that is comprehensive and fair. She writes in a way that respects her subject, recognizes her, feels empathy towards everyone involved and yet remains objective. I like when an author respects my intelligence and allows me to pick apart the puzzle pieces myself-and this is very necessary with a subject like Sylvia Plath.
I think what was so painful in considering her life story- and the way she ended it-is that there could have been a different story. In considering when something tragic happens in life the hardest part is acceptance. You can't consider the life of Sylvia Plath without taking in her death. And Clark has finally given me closure on this. Somehow I understand how it became so inevitable for her. And her final poems leave us with -not just the torrent of energy and the sheer dazzling nature of these poems-but she left clues of the things she couldn't say. Ariel was published two years after her death. But Hughes edited it. He claimed he chose the better poems but many of the ones he took out point directly at him. Even Daddy is more about him. Plath would be shocked by the literal interpretations of that poem.
Writing was Sylvia's lifeblood. And she lived during an extremely sexist era in recent history. She couldn't even get a mortgage without her husband. And yet just a few months after her death was the publication of The Feminine Mystique (which would be everything she could relate to). How much the world was just starting to change for women.
She lived thru WWII-but remained a pacifist and a humanitarian. She lived thru McCarthyism but held very liberal views -particularly for being in a conservative and white neighborhood. She was very antiracist for her time-she spoke out against racial strife in her teenage years-despite being surrounded by racism. She embraced the Jewish culture which she most likely had on her mother's side but she was raised as a Unitarian by two intellectuals. She would remain an atheist.
Her death remains to us a mysterious tragedy. Who could have known if she would have wanted to take it back.
But we have the poems, her legacy.
I first read Plath when I was eighteen and the timing felt perfect because Syvia was at the same age at the beginning of her journal. I could close my eyes and see the world she was describing perfectly. I could even feel what the evening sky smelled like.
I ended up reading everything I could about her. And what really struck me was how unkind her biographers were. Clark's biography is the first that is comprehensive and fair. She writes in a way that respects her subject, recognizes her, feels empathy towards everyone involved and yet remains objective. I like when an author respects my intelligence and allows me to pick apart the puzzle pieces myself-and this is very necessary with a subject like Sylvia Plath.
I think what was so painful in considering her life story- and the way she ended it-is that there could have been a different story. In considering when something tragic happens in life the hardest part is acceptance. You can't consider the life of Sylvia Plath without taking in her death. And Clark has finally given me closure on this. Somehow I understand how it became so inevitable for her. And her final poems leave us with -not just the torrent of energy and the sheer dazzling nature of these poems-but she left clues of the things she couldn't say. Ariel was published two years after her death. But Hughes edited it. He claimed he chose the better poems but many of the ones he took out point directly at him. Even Daddy is more about him. Plath would be shocked by the literal interpretations of that poem.
Writing was Sylvia's lifeblood. And she lived during an extremely sexist era in recent history. She couldn't even get a mortgage without her husband. And yet just a few months after her death was the publication of The Feminine Mystique (which would be everything she could relate to). How much the world was just starting to change for women.
She lived thru WWII-but remained a pacifist and a humanitarian. She lived thru McCarthyism but held very liberal views -particularly for being in a conservative and white neighborhood. She was very antiracist for her time-she spoke out against racial strife in her teenage years-despite being surrounded by racism. She embraced the Jewish culture which she most likely had on her mother's side but she was raised as a Unitarian by two intellectuals. She would remain an atheist.
Her death remains to us a mysterious tragedy. Who could have known if she would have wanted to take it back.
But we have the poems, her legacy.
February 5, 2021
Exemplary biography that both honours and coolly, respectfully considers the life and legacy of the great poet. There is never a sense of Plath as entirely lovable or entirely difficult: in other words, we get a full representation of a complex, fascinating subject who was awkward and brilliant, loving and distant, confident and miserably lacking in self-worth. Finally, we're left with the poems and numerous accounts of the life. The best of the former are unquestionably great; of the latter this offers the first full biography, a highly readable and perceptive portrayal, and by far the best available means of trying to understand an often badly-misunderstood literary giant. Tragic, of course; but Clark makes it clear that the implicit tragedy should not be allowed to overshadow the grand accomplishment of the work. The enduring sense of Plath for this reader was of a writer of incredible fortitude and courage, very far from the mendaciously pervasive spurned flake of popular mythology. As Clark elegantly augments, Plath transposed her torment into some of the greatest poems ever written. This should surely be her enduring legacy.
'Sylvia Plath always sought the light of the mind. That light was her lodestar in the face of depression, when all went “cold and planetary.”168 She tried to feed this clarion flame with literature, art, philosophy, drama, travel, love—anything to prevent its extinguishment. Plath told friends that it was the final dimming of that light, the threat of exile from her own person, that had led her to attempt suicide in 1953.
“When you’re crazy, that’s all you ever are,” she told Ellie Friedman in 1954.169 Plath’s last letter to Dr. Beuscher reveals that she thought she was on the verge of another breakdown that would leave her permanently incapacitated. The prospect of losing her sanity seems to have made her consider suicide sometime in late January, when she burst into Trevor Thomas’s flat in tears and told him that she did not want to die.
But there may have been a stronger impetus for Plath’s final act—stronger, even, than depression: maternal love. In “Delivering Frieda,” an early draft of Hughes’s poem “Remission,” he wrote,
That last poem you wrote designed, modelling your death,
You planned to take her with you.
You wrote “She is taking them with her.”
Poetic justice crossed it out cancelled poetic frenzy.
You went on alone. Now erase delete
That line utterly. Reabsorb
Into unbeing every letter of it—
Let your last sea-cold kiss evaporate
From the salt affliction.
Hughes was talking about the first draft of “Edge,” where Plath had written, and then crossed out, “She is taking them with her.” But he was also referring to something else. According to Ted and Olwyn, who both read Sylvia’s last journal, Sylvia had contemplated taking her children “with her” when she committed suicide. This was one of the reasons Hughes claimed to have burned part of Plath’s last journal.
Thoughts of harming one’s children are symptomatic of severe postpartum depression, known as postpartum psychosis, which in 20 percent of cases can last “beyond the first year after delivery.” Mothers with a history of depression are at much greater risk of developing postpartum depression, as Dr. Beuscher had warned Sylvia in the late 1950s. Plath had a history of such psychosis; she had fantasized about killing her mother during her first breakdown, and had told her friend Catherine Frankfort that she thought she was suffering from postpartum depression in the winter of 1962–63.
“I am terrified by this dark thing / That sleeps in me,” Plath wrote in “Elm.” “All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.” She may have used what she thought were her last remnants of lucidity and free will to protect her children from herself. For Sylvia Plath knew what happened when the light went out. She had tapped that bottom. She had been there.'
'Sylvia Plath always sought the light of the mind. That light was her lodestar in the face of depression, when all went “cold and planetary.”168 She tried to feed this clarion flame with literature, art, philosophy, drama, travel, love—anything to prevent its extinguishment. Plath told friends that it was the final dimming of that light, the threat of exile from her own person, that had led her to attempt suicide in 1953.
“When you’re crazy, that’s all you ever are,” she told Ellie Friedman in 1954.169 Plath’s last letter to Dr. Beuscher reveals that she thought she was on the verge of another breakdown that would leave her permanently incapacitated. The prospect of losing her sanity seems to have made her consider suicide sometime in late January, when she burst into Trevor Thomas’s flat in tears and told him that she did not want to die.
But there may have been a stronger impetus for Plath’s final act—stronger, even, than depression: maternal love. In “Delivering Frieda,” an early draft of Hughes’s poem “Remission,” he wrote,
That last poem you wrote designed, modelling your death,
You planned to take her with you.
You wrote “She is taking them with her.”
Poetic justice crossed it out cancelled poetic frenzy.
You went on alone. Now erase delete
That line utterly. Reabsorb
Into unbeing every letter of it—
Let your last sea-cold kiss evaporate
From the salt affliction.
Hughes was talking about the first draft of “Edge,” where Plath had written, and then crossed out, “She is taking them with her.” But he was also referring to something else. According to Ted and Olwyn, who both read Sylvia’s last journal, Sylvia had contemplated taking her children “with her” when she committed suicide. This was one of the reasons Hughes claimed to have burned part of Plath’s last journal.
Thoughts of harming one’s children are symptomatic of severe postpartum depression, known as postpartum psychosis, which in 20 percent of cases can last “beyond the first year after delivery.” Mothers with a history of depression are at much greater risk of developing postpartum depression, as Dr. Beuscher had warned Sylvia in the late 1950s. Plath had a history of such psychosis; she had fantasized about killing her mother during her first breakdown, and had told her friend Catherine Frankfort that she thought she was suffering from postpartum depression in the winter of 1962–63.
“I am terrified by this dark thing / That sleeps in me,” Plath wrote in “Elm.” “All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.” She may have used what she thought were her last remnants of lucidity and free will to protect her children from herself. For Sylvia Plath knew what happened when the light went out. She had tapped that bottom. She had been there.'
February 4, 2022
Just brilliant. I loved every little bit of this COMPREHENSIVE biography of Sylvia Plath. Just incredibly-well researched, and based in very large part on Plath’s letters and journals, as well as personal interviews. It’s a door-stopper at 1118 pages, but a big chunk of that is copious footnotes and an index. Still, at 941 pages of “story,” it’s not for the faint of heart.
Thank you to my buddy-reader friend Camie who suggested this - before she know how long it was! We gritted our teeth and tackled the monster, and we’re so glad we did.
I highly recommend this. It is not boring, it is not a slog, it is absolutely fabulous. It’s a book that makes you think and feel, the very best kind of book.
I’ve read ‘The Bell Jar” twice, once as a young woman and again several years ago. I think I need to give it another “enlightened” go as well as her collections of poetry. Clark provides and analyzes chunks of her poetry, but this is not an anthology of her writing. It’s the story of her life.
If you end up reading this, I would love to hear your thoughts!
Thanks to Camie, as always, for the buddy read.
Thank you to my buddy-reader friend Camie who suggested this - before she know how long it was! We gritted our teeth and tackled the monster, and we’re so glad we did.
I highly recommend this. It is not boring, it is not a slog, it is absolutely fabulous. It’s a book that makes you think and feel, the very best kind of book.
I’ve read ‘The Bell Jar” twice, once as a young woman and again several years ago. I think I need to give it another “enlightened” go as well as her collections of poetry. Clark provides and analyzes chunks of her poetry, but this is not an anthology of her writing. It’s the story of her life.
If you end up reading this, I would love to hear your thoughts!
Thanks to Camie, as always, for the buddy read.
October 9, 2020
This meticulously researched and detailed biography of Sylvia Plath starts in her childhood, and follows her through dating, boyfriends, Smith College, a Fulbright to Cambridge, and her marriage, motherhood, and beyond. I did wonder if Sylvia had come of age in the sixties instead of the fifties, (where even the brightest women were expected to be mothers and housewives and support a husband's career) if her story would have had a different ending. Certainly the mores of the fifties would not have supported a scenario where she moved in with the irresistible Ted, found out that he was a philanderer, and split.We will never know. Anyone curious about this literary icon would be well served to read Clark's biography. Thanks to the publisher and Edelweiss for the ARC.
June 15, 2020
This, a 1000+ page forthcoming critical bio of Plath, is clearly Pandemic Summer Reading. I have been living inside this ARC for two weeks. It is so well-sourced and respectful, it's like a dream. Pre-ordered.
September 13, 2020
I got this as a NetGalley ARC.
This is the first biography of Sylvia Plath I have read that didn't lean on the tropes that have haunted her memory for decades. The author worked diligently to portray Sylvia (and christ, even Ted Hughes) as complete humans. Sure it took 1152 pages but what else do I have to do during quarantine?
This is the first biography of Sylvia Plath I have read that didn't lean on the tropes that have haunted her memory for decades. The author worked diligently to portray Sylvia (and christ, even Ted Hughes) as complete humans. Sure it took 1152 pages but what else do I have to do during quarantine?
April 27, 2023
Finishing this extraordinary work feels like an accomplishment, one I did not think I would achieve. Coming in at nearly 1000 pages (nearly 1200 with the notes) it took me quite a while to get through. I had started it last year and by the beginning of the month I was only to page 369. In fact, in the early chapters of book 2, I considered just letting this one go. There was a great deal of detail added that weighed the book down. Nearly every detail of SP’s life was included, what she ate, where she went, who she dated (and she dated a lot) what she wore and what she bought. It was a little tedious frankly. But when she meets Ted and she begins to find her own particular authorial voice the book became unputdownable for me. I found myself taking it everywhere and squeezing in moments whenever I could.
The author is careful to be respectful and unbiased, laying out things as they were and presenting also how things were perceived and why some of those perceptions were possibly unlikely. On the whole it painted a picture of an extraordinary woman and all that minutiae of detail that at first was rather exasperating, presented a fairly fleshed out person in which one could see how much she evolved from her time in school to the woman she became. As she dealt with the abandonment by her husband, as a new mom of a toddler and a baby, trying to remake herself as a writer and single mother, at a time when there was a great deal of disapproval towards women for doing either, I felt such admiration for her. The confluence of circumstances that led to her suicide was terribly sad to read of. If any one of those circumstances had been different would she have made it through and who would she have become?
Having read The Bell Jar last year (the reason I had been drawn to this monster of a biography) I came away with a feeling of not quite liking SP. Her writing revealed a racist and judge-y character that I did not find very likeable. But Plath was definitely a woman of the time she was born to. I know something of that, having a mother and a stepmother both born during the same era, both that were very much a product of the time they lived in but also both finding ways to throw off the smothering conventions and restrictions they felt, in ways that were definitely not conventional of the time they lived in. As such, I have read SP’s work with them both in mind for she helps me understand them both a little better but I cannot help wondering how SP’s life might have been different with the changing times that her death was just on the cusp of and I feel very sad for her. Reading the works she created and having them directly tied to what was going on for her when she wrote them made for an excellent reading experience and had me taking my very old (and sadly damaged) American Treasury of Poems off the shelf and rereading the poems I loved, my favourite being Cut, a poem SP wrote after having badly cut her thumb.
I think now that I have finished this, I am curious if my feelings of dislike would still be present if I were to reread the Bell Jar. I have been feeling very pulled to reread it now, especially in light of some insights that were shared in this very thorough biography regarding the commentary of the political climate in the states around the anti-communism fervour and the very real fears that they were on the brink of a nuclear war with Russia, a topic of conversation I recall having on more than one occasion with my mom, who was a new mother herself at the time, and was something I was just barely picking up on with the reread.
So, though this had a very slow start for me, this was in the end an amazing read and I’m so glad I stuck with it.
The author is careful to be respectful and unbiased, laying out things as they were and presenting also how things were perceived and why some of those perceptions were possibly unlikely. On the whole it painted a picture of an extraordinary woman and all that minutiae of detail that at first was rather exasperating, presented a fairly fleshed out person in which one could see how much she evolved from her time in school to the woman she became. As she dealt with the abandonment by her husband, as a new mom of a toddler and a baby, trying to remake herself as a writer and single mother, at a time when there was a great deal of disapproval towards women for doing either, I felt such admiration for her. The confluence of circumstances that led to her suicide was terribly sad to read of. If any one of those circumstances had been different would she have made it through and who would she have become?
Having read The Bell Jar last year (the reason I had been drawn to this monster of a biography) I came away with a feeling of not quite liking SP. Her writing revealed a racist and judge-y character that I did not find very likeable. But Plath was definitely a woman of the time she was born to. I know something of that, having a mother and a stepmother both born during the same era, both that were very much a product of the time they lived in but also both finding ways to throw off the smothering conventions and restrictions they felt, in ways that were definitely not conventional of the time they lived in. As such, I have read SP’s work with them both in mind for she helps me understand them both a little better but I cannot help wondering how SP’s life might have been different with the changing times that her death was just on the cusp of and I feel very sad for her. Reading the works she created and having them directly tied to what was going on for her when she wrote them made for an excellent reading experience and had me taking my very old (and sadly damaged) American Treasury of Poems off the shelf and rereading the poems I loved, my favourite being Cut, a poem SP wrote after having badly cut her thumb.
I think now that I have finished this, I am curious if my feelings of dislike would still be present if I were to reread the Bell Jar. I have been feeling very pulled to reread it now, especially in light of some insights that were shared in this very thorough biography regarding the commentary of the political climate in the states around the anti-communism fervour and the very real fears that they were on the brink of a nuclear war with Russia, a topic of conversation I recall having on more than one occasion with my mom, who was a new mother herself at the time, and was something I was just barely picking up on with the reread.
So, though this had a very slow start for me, this was in the end an amazing read and I’m so glad I stuck with it.
January 13, 2021
A long time ago, in my backtime, before I could afford to buy as much poetry as I read, I'd sometimes simply type a copy of a book I admired. One of those was Sylvia Plath's Ariel. I had no idea who she was when I first read her book, probably 1967. I was gobsmacked by her poems expressing lyrical beauty and anger at the same time. I wanted a copy, so I typed one. Later I became interested in her husband Ted Hughes, too. Since then I've always been tuned into the Plath/Hughes industry, have read (and now own) all of their poetry, the letters, journals, and several biographies, even the biography of Assia Wevill, Plath's dark rival for Hughes's love. I'd been feeling a little too saturated in the poets' well-known story until I dived into Heather Clark's new biography of Sylvia. It's a compelling read, an enormous--937 pps of text plus 177 pps of notes, bibliography and index--examination of Plath's life and work, filled with new information and perspectives.
Unlike some Plath studies, Clark's work is refreshingly even-handed. She doesn't mete out blame for Plath's periods of madness or for her suicide. Hughes blamed himself. Aurelia Plath, her mother, blamed herself. Her London GP who was inexperienced with the combinations of drugs she was taking arranged a psychiatric stay too late and came to blame himself. Clark's conclusions are convincing enough: Sylvia had had a previous psychiatric breakdown, suicide attempt, and hospitalization, and she lived in fear of another hospital stay, one that might also involve electroshock treatment. The mind-fogging drug combination and fear of the psychiatric ward had much more to do with her suicide than the breakup with Hughes. At the time of her suicide there existed the good chance they'd reconcile.
Not to ignore the fact that the marriage was troubled. One major problem was that Sylvia felt a sense of rivalry with Hughes. Both were gifted poets, perhaps genius, and she always put his work first. Her ambitions, however, seemed stronger than his. Or maybe it was that, being a woman in 1960s London, she had to work that much harder. Famously Plath painted a rosy picture for her mother in America and for her British friends, but her more honest journal entries show her to have been complaining and unhappy. Clark uses both the happy correspondences and grumbling personal jottings and points out the contrasts when they exist. Sylvia's reality and fantasy were frequently at odds. The biography overall shows her more troubled from the start than we knew. Yet as competitive as Plath was in her writing, I think it interesting that Clark finds Hughes considerably influential in the style and content of her poetry. And it was always she, acting as his agent, who drove the desire to expand his reputation, who helped make him an international poet. Hughes always acknowledged that she made him.
This is serious biography that tries to say everything there is to say about Plath. One of the great things about the book is its detail. In covering certain periods of her life, like her June 1953 stint in New York City as a Mademoiselle guest editor that became the source for her renowned semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, or her "Mad Passionate Abandon, February 1956" romance with Hughes, the book is a day-by-day record of events. Clark has looked under every leaf for fact, turned every page in search of new aspects. She has seemingly had access to every shard of the Plath/Hughes archive, including the unpublished works. The reader even learns the monthly amounts in Ted and Sylvia's bank accounts and what brands of diapers or soap powder she preferred. Even lovers: we've understood Plath to be very sexually active, but so complete is Clark's census that "we had not thought so many had crossed London Bridge," to borrow from Eliot who borrowed from Dante. This is the biography of a major poet, too, and it's therefore complete and useful in its insightful analysis of her poems.
Someone said the job of the biographer is to bring the deed to life. Clark certainly does that. Plath lives here with more realization and understanding than any other biography of her I've read. This is the definitive biography of her. There will not be a better, more complete understanding of her in my lifetime, and probably not yours.
Unlike some Plath studies, Clark's work is refreshingly even-handed. She doesn't mete out blame for Plath's periods of madness or for her suicide. Hughes blamed himself. Aurelia Plath, her mother, blamed herself. Her London GP who was inexperienced with the combinations of drugs she was taking arranged a psychiatric stay too late and came to blame himself. Clark's conclusions are convincing enough: Sylvia had had a previous psychiatric breakdown, suicide attempt, and hospitalization, and she lived in fear of another hospital stay, one that might also involve electroshock treatment. The mind-fogging drug combination and fear of the psychiatric ward had much more to do with her suicide than the breakup with Hughes. At the time of her suicide there existed the good chance they'd reconcile.
Not to ignore the fact that the marriage was troubled. One major problem was that Sylvia felt a sense of rivalry with Hughes. Both were gifted poets, perhaps genius, and she always put his work first. Her ambitions, however, seemed stronger than his. Or maybe it was that, being a woman in 1960s London, she had to work that much harder. Famously Plath painted a rosy picture for her mother in America and for her British friends, but her more honest journal entries show her to have been complaining and unhappy. Clark uses both the happy correspondences and grumbling personal jottings and points out the contrasts when they exist. Sylvia's reality and fantasy were frequently at odds. The biography overall shows her more troubled from the start than we knew. Yet as competitive as Plath was in her writing, I think it interesting that Clark finds Hughes considerably influential in the style and content of her poetry. And it was always she, acting as his agent, who drove the desire to expand his reputation, who helped make him an international poet. Hughes always acknowledged that she made him.
This is serious biography that tries to say everything there is to say about Plath. One of the great things about the book is its detail. In covering certain periods of her life, like her June 1953 stint in New York City as a Mademoiselle guest editor that became the source for her renowned semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, or her "Mad Passionate Abandon, February 1956" romance with Hughes, the book is a day-by-day record of events. Clark has looked under every leaf for fact, turned every page in search of new aspects. She has seemingly had access to every shard of the Plath/Hughes archive, including the unpublished works. The reader even learns the monthly amounts in Ted and Sylvia's bank accounts and what brands of diapers or soap powder she preferred. Even lovers: we've understood Plath to be very sexually active, but so complete is Clark's census that "we had not thought so many had crossed London Bridge," to borrow from Eliot who borrowed from Dante. This is the biography of a major poet, too, and it's therefore complete and useful in its insightful analysis of her poems.
Someone said the job of the biographer is to bring the deed to life. Clark certainly does that. Plath lives here with more realization and understanding than any other biography of her I've read. This is the definitive biography of her. There will not be a better, more complete understanding of her in my lifetime, and probably not yours.
October 18, 2020
This is the most comprehensive and objective biography of Plath I have read in a long time and much use has been made of new information revealed in the recently published complete letters, the Harriet Rosenstein archive, and the author’s own research. Previous biographies such as Bitter Fame by Ann Stevenson and Olwyn Hughes were too obviously biased towards Ted Hughes, while others portray Plath as a passive victim of Hughes. This biography is honest about the faults and virtues of both Hughes and Plath. Sylvia Plath is not portrayed as a plaster saint victimised by Hughes but as a very determined and tenacious person who did not suffer fools and expected the same perfectionistic high standards of others as she did of herself. Bad boys thrilled and excited her, and she was something of a masochist in that respect. She enjoyed a sexually sadistic relationship with Richard Sassoon and found a perfect substitute for him in Hughes when Sassoon dumped her in France. The choice of the wild, sexually virile and poetically gifted Hughes as her life partner rather than nice boys such as the safe and conventional Dick Norton or Gordon Lameyer was a big gamble, one that she was more than willing to take, for the sake of her art. She was more than a match for Hughes, and thought she could handle or ‘manage’ him. Plath was ‘one very tough lady’ and deliberately pursued the life of a mother and writer with all the insecurity and juggling of domestic responsibilities that entailed. She was no feminist and yet was determined to ‘have it all’. She wanted lots of babies and to cook for her man at the same time as she wanted to be a prolific artist. The gamble paid off in terms of her art and she remains one of the most famous women poets of all time, but the consequences for her personal life proved to be disastrous.
September 29, 2022
One thousand pages of tedium, the most literal-minded and utterly repetitious biography I have ever read. Tell me one more time, Professor Cluck, that Sylvia Plath lived in a sexist era. Use that as an excuse for everything poor, brave Sylvia ever did just one more time. Just one . . . more . . . time!
It is to laugh, really. In the Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer writes about Sergeant Croft, "no, but why is Croft that way? Oh, there are The Answers. He is that way, because of the-corruption-of-the-society." Mailer was trying to tell us something. It's reductive and patronizing to write about Sylvia Plath as if she was a victim. In her own way, she was just as brave and just as crazy as Sergeant Croft. Just as American, too. She attacked every poem like it was her own personal Mount Anaka.
The first premonition I got that this would be a phony book was the title. "Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath." Classy title! What does it remind me of? Something from Milton, something from Shelley? No, it actually reminds me of "Wired: the Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi." The problem is, poor old Professor Cluck is much too dumb and much too literal-minded to understand the point of her own title, i.e. that Sylvia Plath had much, much more in common with John Belushi (and Elvis, and James Dean, and Jim Morrison) than with the polite lady poets of yesteryear. It would be heresy to make the obvious connection, and to suggest that Sylvia Plath was an All-American rebel at heart, because powerful forces have decreed that she's the ultimate feminist martyr . . . and nothing else!
See, you don't get insight in this book. You don't get outrage. You don't get heresy. What you get is the party line. Over and over. For a thousand pages! The sexism of New England. The sexism of Smith. The sexism of Cambridge. The sexism of Devonshire. Even when she gets shock treatments it's a sexist conspiracy. (Ernest Hemingway got the same treatments. And they called him Papa!) But I get the point. Sylvia is Christ. Men are Christ-killers. Enough already!
But to be fair, if you want to know every bar Sylvia ever drank in, every boy she ever dated, every lit course she ever took, every meal she ever cooked, every diaper she ever changed, and read every single letter she ever wrote to her mother, her best friend, her psychiatrist, her agent, her cleaning lady, her babysitter, her babysitter's mother's hairdresser . . . well, it's all here.
No, I mean it.
Every single letter Sylvia ever wrote . . . is here!
And strangely, Sylvia never seems to notice the sexism of her era. She's more interested in dating the perfect boy, writing the perfect term paper, catching the perfect husband, writing the perfect poem, and so on and so on. The saddest thing in the world is Sylvia Plath in "booster" mode. It's like, "despite all breakdowns, erratic behavior and manic episodes in the past, I am absolutely confident now that everything is going to be incredibly fabulous because I have the most virile, brilliant husband in history and every single person in England thinks he is a genius and together we are writing the most brilliant poems and buying the most beautiful manor in the most beautiful village in the most beautiful corner of Devonshire and then . . ." Boom! Like Smokey Robinson said, I got ta dance to keep from crying. Poor brave Sylvia. You can see how hard she worked to keep from realizing how depressed she was. And it's not funny, it's really not. But when every letter is presented in such a dull, repetitious manner, it starts to sound really funny. Even when she loses Ted. ("All other men are ANTS compared to him!")
This book is the exact opposite of ELVIS by Albert Goldman. They're both lengthy biographies of American originals who destroyed themselves. But the funny thing is, Goldman detested Elvis. He loathed him. He had no respect for his life, his art, or his dignity as a human being. Yet Goldman could be more insightful about Elvis in one page than Professor Cluck is in 973. Like when Elvis is in Vegas, in a rhinestone suit, with sunglasses on, doped out of his mind. And Colonel Parker walks in and Elvis instantly snaps to attention. And Goldman says, "like all junkies, Elvis is an expert at conning the squares that he's straight."
When you read poor Sylvia's letters, from high school to Smith to Cambridge to Devon to London to the very end, you really see her putting her best face on for everyone. She's trying so desperately to con the squares that she's straight. And where Albert Goldman sees through it Professor Cluck is the squarest of squares and desperate to be taken in. I had to give this book three stars because I feel that anyone who writes a thousand page book deserves some kind of respect. But I can't say there were any new insights or vital connections made.
It is to laugh, really. In the Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer writes about Sergeant Croft, "no, but why is Croft that way? Oh, there are The Answers. He is that way, because of the-corruption-of-the-society." Mailer was trying to tell us something. It's reductive and patronizing to write about Sylvia Plath as if she was a victim. In her own way, she was just as brave and just as crazy as Sergeant Croft. Just as American, too. She attacked every poem like it was her own personal Mount Anaka.
The first premonition I got that this would be a phony book was the title. "Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath." Classy title! What does it remind me of? Something from Milton, something from Shelley? No, it actually reminds me of "Wired: the Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi." The problem is, poor old Professor Cluck is much too dumb and much too literal-minded to understand the point of her own title, i.e. that Sylvia Plath had much, much more in common with John Belushi (and Elvis, and James Dean, and Jim Morrison) than with the polite lady poets of yesteryear. It would be heresy to make the obvious connection, and to suggest that Sylvia Plath was an All-American rebel at heart, because powerful forces have decreed that she's the ultimate feminist martyr . . . and nothing else!
See, you don't get insight in this book. You don't get outrage. You don't get heresy. What you get is the party line. Over and over. For a thousand pages! The sexism of New England. The sexism of Smith. The sexism of Cambridge. The sexism of Devonshire. Even when she gets shock treatments it's a sexist conspiracy. (Ernest Hemingway got the same treatments. And they called him Papa!) But I get the point. Sylvia is Christ. Men are Christ-killers. Enough already!
But to be fair, if you want to know every bar Sylvia ever drank in, every boy she ever dated, every lit course she ever took, every meal she ever cooked, every diaper she ever changed, and read every single letter she ever wrote to her mother, her best friend, her psychiatrist, her agent, her cleaning lady, her babysitter, her babysitter's mother's hairdresser . . . well, it's all here.
No, I mean it.
Every single letter Sylvia ever wrote . . . is here!
And strangely, Sylvia never seems to notice the sexism of her era. She's more interested in dating the perfect boy, writing the perfect term paper, catching the perfect husband, writing the perfect poem, and so on and so on. The saddest thing in the world is Sylvia Plath in "booster" mode. It's like, "despite all breakdowns, erratic behavior and manic episodes in the past, I am absolutely confident now that everything is going to be incredibly fabulous because I have the most virile, brilliant husband in history and every single person in England thinks he is a genius and together we are writing the most brilliant poems and buying the most beautiful manor in the most beautiful village in the most beautiful corner of Devonshire and then . . ." Boom! Like Smokey Robinson said, I got ta dance to keep from crying. Poor brave Sylvia. You can see how hard she worked to keep from realizing how depressed she was. And it's not funny, it's really not. But when every letter is presented in such a dull, repetitious manner, it starts to sound really funny. Even when she loses Ted. ("All other men are ANTS compared to him!")
This book is the exact opposite of ELVIS by Albert Goldman. They're both lengthy biographies of American originals who destroyed themselves. But the funny thing is, Goldman detested Elvis. He loathed him. He had no respect for his life, his art, or his dignity as a human being. Yet Goldman could be more insightful about Elvis in one page than Professor Cluck is in 973. Like when Elvis is in Vegas, in a rhinestone suit, with sunglasses on, doped out of his mind. And Colonel Parker walks in and Elvis instantly snaps to attention. And Goldman says, "like all junkies, Elvis is an expert at conning the squares that he's straight."
When you read poor Sylvia's letters, from high school to Smith to Cambridge to Devon to London to the very end, you really see her putting her best face on for everyone. She's trying so desperately to con the squares that she's straight. And where Albert Goldman sees through it Professor Cluck is the squarest of squares and desperate to be taken in. I had to give this book three stars because I feel that anyone who writes a thousand page book deserves some kind of respect. But I can't say there were any new insights or vital connections made.
December 1, 2020
I know that a biography is splendid when I wish it had more than 1100 pages, when I emerge after 2 weeks of solid reading with an index card filled with poems, writers, events, and publishers I need to know more about, and when I know I'll read it again, this time WITH the Collected Poems by my side.
What's different about this biography? I have read very little of Ted Hughes's poetry, but that didn't stop me from appreciating how Clark showed how his and Sylvia's works played and sparked off each other's. For that alone, I am grateful, because, short of Birthday Letters, there aren't enough poem-by-poem, image-by-image comparisons out there (at least, outside purely academic works). The excerpts were dazzling and very, very illuminating.
(And now, to reread a lot of Sara Teasdale before I plunge into my next big read.)
What's different about this biography? I have read very little of Ted Hughes's poetry, but that didn't stop me from appreciating how Clark showed how his and Sylvia's works played and sparked off each other's. For that alone, I am grateful, because, short of Birthday Letters, there aren't enough poem-by-poem, image-by-image comparisons out there (at least, outside purely academic works). The excerpts were dazzling and very, very illuminating.
(And now, to reread a lot of Sara Teasdale before I plunge into my next big read.)
November 20, 2020
Heather Clark brings Sylvia Plath alive on the page. Typically, Plath is remembered for her suicide but there was so much more to her. Complex, living in a male-dominated world where female poets were not taken seriously, desperate to have a family (as well as a career). Plath was a genius.
If I could give it 10 stars, I would. The writing is superb and reads almost like a novel. Nonfiction at it's best. Sad to see it end and now I'm diving deep into her poetry, letters, and journals.
This book should win a major award. Highly, highly recommend.
If I could give it 10 stars, I would. The writing is superb and reads almost like a novel. Nonfiction at it's best. Sad to see it end and now I'm diving deep into her poetry, letters, and journals.
This book should win a major award. Highly, highly recommend.
December 30, 2021
Wow. This book...
I'm a huge devotee of all things Sylvia. Since college, she seems to come in and out of my life in spans where I become hugely involved with her work. A few months ago was one of those times, where I had both her Letters and her Unabridged Journals open in my lap, going back and forth to try to get the full picture. (I eventually abandoned the letters because they were a sunshine-y front for the reality portrayed in her journals.) I then decided to embark upon a deep dive into poem analysis. No poetry scholar am I, but I had a good time marking up my copies of Ariel and Collected Poems with my own thoughts. As if I were trying to get closer to this incredible artist any way I could.
And then came Heather Clark's incredible biography. Clark--who IS a poetry scholar--has provided the ultimate synthesis between letters, journals, and poetry, so that we see Sylvia as a whole person, by her own words and remembrances of those who knew her best. Clark had read and interviewed every one of SP's surviving contemporaries to paint the most complete picture of the brilliant SP in all her facets--the good, the bad, and the ultra resilient--and to give us a clearer picture of her last, desperate days.
Notably absent from her acknowledgements is Frieda Hughes who has adopted a defensive stance with regard to SP history, likely to protect her father. And with good cause. It's clear Clark did her due diligence to try to remain impartial with regards to the drama of the SP/Ted Hughes mythology, letting the players speak their own lines instead of adding her speculation. The effect is a pretty stark confirmation that Ted Hughes didn't, up to his own death, take responsibility for his behavior.
To be clear, he's not responsible for SP's suicide. His betrayal, the coldest winter, caring alone for two small children, illness, the threat of being re-institutionalized when botched shock treatment from ten years before still haunted her...It all culminated in a perfect storm. As she wrote in Edge, her last poem,
We have come so far. It is over.
But TH was reckless and careless with SP's heart. His partner in life and art was suddenly reduced to a jailer who kept him imprisoned, as if she'd coerced the vows out of his mouth. Clark shares in detail the symbiotic relationship between SP and TH and gives him full credit for taking on childcare to let SP write in a time where that was unheard of. But his actions in the last six months of SP's life reveal a man who suddenly decided, upon meeting Assia Wevill--a married woman--that his entire 6 year marriage with SP was a constricting prison that had prevented him from creating. Never mind that she is the reason anyone knows who he is.
At face value, separated from SP, his poetry isn't all that good. "The Thought-Fox" is one of his best known works but I can't get past the juvenile title and the trite patness of the poem itself. Birthday Letters reads more like short essays, some banal, peppered with some pretty imagery. It was a bestseller when it came out in 1998 but honestly did anyone rush out to buy it because TH wrote it, or because the poems were about Sylvia? By his own words, he'd be fly fishing off a rock in Australia and not Poet Laureate if not for her diligence in getting him published. It's not overstating to say he owes her his career, but the second he lays eyes on Assia, his marriage to SP was forfeit and the life she helped build came crumbling down. In the last weeks of her life, he treats her poorly, dangling reconciliation in her face while taking on a second mistress at the same time.
TH didn't "murder" SP as some feminist poets attest, but his cavalier disregard for her pain (pain that he knew and wrote about and sold in the Birthday poems, where he tries to pin the bulk of her anguish on her father) speaks to a poor character. As does the fact he moved into SP's London flat with his pregnant mistress after SP had paid the rent for a year. Or how he blamed Mistress #2 for him potentially missing a phone call from SP in her last, desperate hours.
But to sum up Sylvia as merely reflections of the men in her life is to actually do her disservice. Clark avoids playing up the salacious and the dramatic, but reveals the woman in all her flawed glory, as genius driven to make something of herself in a time when women weren't expected to make more than dinner and babies. SP is inspiring and special, not because of her suicide or earlier attempt, but for what she endured up to that breaking point. The pressures society slammed down on her, and her own perfectionism that drove her so hard.
As Clark stated in her forward, her goal was to remove SP from the mythos of suicide and feminist icon, and portray her as a whole person, and she's succeeded marvelously. By letting the players in SP's life speak in their own words, the clearest and most definitive account of this remarkable artist's life has now been written. It incorporates every aspect of SP and adds insightful poetic analysis, as it's in her poetry wherein her true voice lies. SP's Ariel poems, as Clark illustrates, were not "about" TH or her father solely--to believe that is to give those men too much credit, and erase the misogynistic post-war, post-Holocaust, Cold War-threat-of-annihilation-world in which she lived and worked. She is raging against it all, scraping herself raw and doing it bravely, with cold-stiff fingers at 4am, before the babies wake.
I read the last few chapters with my heart in my throat, as they raced like the Ariel arrow, toward the suicidal eye of inevitability. I wanted to reach into the pages and pull SP out of that cold, snow-choked flat and put her on her Nauset beach, warm and sun-filled, so she might heal. She was only 30 years old. In the past, I'd been saddened by that loss of so many years' worth of her words and art. After closing Clark's book, I felt a kind of grief for the lost woman. Clark has elevated Sylvia Plath from icon, artist and poet, and showed her as a pure human being, who fought to rise out of the societal prisons that sought to trap her.
If she must be a myth, let her be Ariadne, laying down the threads, leading us out from the center of the labyrinth. Let us not desert her.
No, let's not desert her, but remember her for her mind, her talent, her art, and her resilience. Not for her final act. It was the period at the end of her sentence, not the beginning of her story.
I'm a huge devotee of all things Sylvia. Since college, she seems to come in and out of my life in spans where I become hugely involved with her work. A few months ago was one of those times, where I had both her Letters and her Unabridged Journals open in my lap, going back and forth to try to get the full picture. (I eventually abandoned the letters because they were a sunshine-y front for the reality portrayed in her journals.) I then decided to embark upon a deep dive into poem analysis. No poetry scholar am I, but I had a good time marking up my copies of Ariel and Collected Poems with my own thoughts. As if I were trying to get closer to this incredible artist any way I could.
And then came Heather Clark's incredible biography. Clark--who IS a poetry scholar--has provided the ultimate synthesis between letters, journals, and poetry, so that we see Sylvia as a whole person, by her own words and remembrances of those who knew her best. Clark had read and interviewed every one of SP's surviving contemporaries to paint the most complete picture of the brilliant SP in all her facets--the good, the bad, and the ultra resilient--and to give us a clearer picture of her last, desperate days.
Notably absent from her acknowledgements is Frieda Hughes who has adopted a defensive stance with regard to SP history, likely to protect her father. And with good cause. It's clear Clark did her due diligence to try to remain impartial with regards to the drama of the SP/Ted Hughes mythology, letting the players speak their own lines instead of adding her speculation. The effect is a pretty stark confirmation that Ted Hughes didn't, up to his own death, take responsibility for his behavior.
To be clear, he's not responsible for SP's suicide. His betrayal, the coldest winter, caring alone for two small children, illness, the threat of being re-institutionalized when botched shock treatment from ten years before still haunted her...It all culminated in a perfect storm. As she wrote in Edge, her last poem,
We have come so far. It is over.
But TH was reckless and careless with SP's heart. His partner in life and art was suddenly reduced to a jailer who kept him imprisoned, as if she'd coerced the vows out of his mouth. Clark shares in detail the symbiotic relationship between SP and TH and gives him full credit for taking on childcare to let SP write in a time where that was unheard of. But his actions in the last six months of SP's life reveal a man who suddenly decided, upon meeting Assia Wevill--a married woman--that his entire 6 year marriage with SP was a constricting prison that had prevented him from creating. Never mind that she is the reason anyone knows who he is.
At face value, separated from SP, his poetry isn't all that good. "The Thought-Fox" is one of his best known works but I can't get past the juvenile title and the trite patness of the poem itself. Birthday Letters reads more like short essays, some banal, peppered with some pretty imagery. It was a bestseller when it came out in 1998 but honestly did anyone rush out to buy it because TH wrote it, or because the poems were about Sylvia? By his own words, he'd be fly fishing off a rock in Australia and not Poet Laureate if not for her diligence in getting him published. It's not overstating to say he owes her his career, but the second he lays eyes on Assia, his marriage to SP was forfeit and the life she helped build came crumbling down. In the last weeks of her life, he treats her poorly, dangling reconciliation in her face while taking on a second mistress at the same time.
TH didn't "murder" SP as some feminist poets attest, but his cavalier disregard for her pain (pain that he knew and wrote about and sold in the Birthday poems, where he tries to pin the bulk of her anguish on her father) speaks to a poor character. As does the fact he moved into SP's London flat with his pregnant mistress after SP had paid the rent for a year. Or how he blamed Mistress #2 for him potentially missing a phone call from SP in her last, desperate hours.
But to sum up Sylvia as merely reflections of the men in her life is to actually do her disservice. Clark avoids playing up the salacious and the dramatic, but reveals the woman in all her flawed glory, as genius driven to make something of herself in a time when women weren't expected to make more than dinner and babies. SP is inspiring and special, not because of her suicide or earlier attempt, but for what she endured up to that breaking point. The pressures society slammed down on her, and her own perfectionism that drove her so hard.
As Clark stated in her forward, her goal was to remove SP from the mythos of suicide and feminist icon, and portray her as a whole person, and she's succeeded marvelously. By letting the players in SP's life speak in their own words, the clearest and most definitive account of this remarkable artist's life has now been written. It incorporates every aspect of SP and adds insightful poetic analysis, as it's in her poetry wherein her true voice lies. SP's Ariel poems, as Clark illustrates, were not "about" TH or her father solely--to believe that is to give those men too much credit, and erase the misogynistic post-war, post-Holocaust, Cold War-threat-of-annihilation-world in which she lived and worked. She is raging against it all, scraping herself raw and doing it bravely, with cold-stiff fingers at 4am, before the babies wake.
I read the last few chapters with my heart in my throat, as they raced like the Ariel arrow, toward the suicidal eye of inevitability. I wanted to reach into the pages and pull SP out of that cold, snow-choked flat and put her on her Nauset beach, warm and sun-filled, so she might heal. She was only 30 years old. In the past, I'd been saddened by that loss of so many years' worth of her words and art. After closing Clark's book, I felt a kind of grief for the lost woman. Clark has elevated Sylvia Plath from icon, artist and poet, and showed her as a pure human being, who fought to rise out of the societal prisons that sought to trap her.
If she must be a myth, let her be Ariadne, laying down the threads, leading us out from the center of the labyrinth. Let us not desert her.
No, let's not desert her, but remember her for her mind, her talent, her art, and her resilience. Not for her final act. It was the period at the end of her sentence, not the beginning of her story.
October 3, 2022
Here’s the thing. So the thing is. What I’m trying to say is… Damnit I spent 40 hours of my life reading about Sylvia Plath and I have no comment.
This book gets a five star rating for achieving what it sought out to do. The energy of this was: “Let’s tell a comprehensive and nuanced definitive biography of Sylvia Plath.” And like, mission accomplished.
This book gets a three star rating from me, a reader.
The best I can say is that Sylvia Plath was a very complicated person, full of contradictions. I am not a person of the “she was of her time and that’s okay” ideology, so I should say: She held every woman in her orbit to a standard so strict, I have no hesitation in referring to her as an anti-feminist. (To be clear, she held herself to a similarly strict standard.) She also wrote a lot of racist things, thought an abortion was a character fault of the woman who had it, and she was incredibly vain. In short? I think if we ever met I would hate her with a fiery passion.
Mentally I’m struggling to reconcile these facts with the portrait in this book, a portrait of a struggling mother who dealt with near constant depression and suicidal ideation throughout her life. I don’t know. She’s complicated, and that’s okay.
I have never read a single piece of her work (shocking, I know), and this biography did not make me more inclined to. Make of that what you will.
Mostly, if you’re thinking of reading this, know that full sections of this follow the most banal and unimportant things going on in her life. Sylvia kept detailed calendars and schedules and I have now heard every single thing she ever wrote in them. I don’t know that I can recommend this book to anyone who isn’t a die hard Sylvia Plath fan.
This book also begs the question, if a biography is going to be so long and detailed that hardly anyone finishes it, did it make a sound?
This book gets a five star rating for achieving what it sought out to do. The energy of this was: “Let’s tell a comprehensive and nuanced definitive biography of Sylvia Plath.” And like, mission accomplished.
This book gets a three star rating from me, a reader.
The best I can say is that Sylvia Plath was a very complicated person, full of contradictions. I am not a person of the “she was of her time and that’s okay” ideology, so I should say: She held every woman in her orbit to a standard so strict, I have no hesitation in referring to her as an anti-feminist. (To be clear, she held herself to a similarly strict standard.) She also wrote a lot of racist things, thought an abortion was a character fault of the woman who had it, and she was incredibly vain. In short? I think if we ever met I would hate her with a fiery passion.
Mentally I’m struggling to reconcile these facts with the portrait in this book, a portrait of a struggling mother who dealt with near constant depression and suicidal ideation throughout her life. I don’t know. She’s complicated, and that’s okay.
I have never read a single piece of her work (shocking, I know), and this biography did not make me more inclined to. Make of that what you will.
Mostly, if you’re thinking of reading this, know that full sections of this follow the most banal and unimportant things going on in her life. Sylvia kept detailed calendars and schedules and I have now heard every single thing she ever wrote in them. I don’t know that I can recommend this book to anyone who isn’t a die hard Sylvia Plath fan.
This book also begs the question, if a biography is going to be so long and detailed that hardly anyone finishes it, did it make a sound?
February 6, 2022
Rave reviews for this 940 page tome about the tragic life of Sylvia Plath !! With over 100 pages of notes and sources this author has really done her research and presents this story in a narrative form which must have been exhausting to compile and write.
The font is small, the page count long, and the story complex, so many thanks to Dianne N for the Buddy Read of this very rewarding book. Now I’m more familiar with the author, I’m very anxious to revisit The Bell Jar with better understanding.
5 stars
The font is small, the page count long, and the story complex, so many thanks to Dianne N for the Buddy Read of this very rewarding book. Now I’m more familiar with the author, I’m very anxious to revisit The Bell Jar with better understanding.
5 stars
December 10, 2020
This was incredible but also fills me with sadness.
December 13, 2020
A book that is long overdue and much needed in the Plath world.
July 5, 2020
Every other piece I have read on Plath focused on the tragedy, not the works she created. I have been a fan of Plath for years, hungrily reading anything I could find. This book is a well researched masterpiece that plays homage to the beautiful mind and life of Plath.
August 29, 2021
I was obsessed with Sylvia Plath’s work as a young teen, a fact that was worrisome to my mom, although being obsessed with her is probably rather normal (if not stereotypical) for a teenage girl. I can vividly recall reading The Bell Jar, checking Ariel out from the library, and in my most precocious moment, using my babysitting money to order a copy of Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters.
Yet it wasn’t until reading this biography that I realized how unknown she was to me, that I was besotted by the mammoth-sized cultural myth surrounding her. The immense praise for this book—that it is the definitive biography of Plath, the biography she’s always deserved—holds true, in my mind. To read Red Comet is to discover that Sylvia Plath the person—the writer—is so much more interesting and compelling than Sylvia Plath the icon of female hysteria.
Clark’s project is, in part, to refute the teleological narrative of Plath’s life that other biographies and writing about her rely on, which treat her death as the inevitable outcome of her life, with every moment pointing towards February 11th 1963. The image of Plath that has coincided with this treatment, of a mad poetess who existed as an almost supernatural vessel for poetry that came pouring out of her in her final months of life, is both sexist and dehumanizing, Clark argues.
Instead, she tells Plath’s life story by using her work as the guiding narrative: her career as a writer, her commitment to developing her craft, her desire to balance this work with being a wife and mother, and the political and social context she was writing in. What emerges is a portrait of a bright, ambitious, driven, and complex woman who desired so much in life, who I found exceptionally relatable.
Clark contends that not only should we consider Plath as one of the most important writers of the 20th century, we should also understand her specifically as a writer of the Cold War. It was fascinating to learn about Plath’s disdain for 1950s American militarism and nuclear aggression, and how her work connects nuclear anxiety with the patriarchal constraints placed on women.
Clark’s readings of Plath’s poems are exceptional—part of what made this book such a rewarding and memorable experience is that it has made me return to both The Bell Jar and her poetry; being able to track the changes in her developing voice and style in her Collected Poems alongside Clark’s narration of her life has been nothing short of extraordinary.
This biography is over 1,000 pages: I listened to it on audio, and it comes in at 45 hours. I would listen to it all over again in a heartbeat, and have ordered a physical copy that I can refer back to. What a profound, unforgettable reading experience.
Yet it wasn’t until reading this biography that I realized how unknown she was to me, that I was besotted by the mammoth-sized cultural myth surrounding her. The immense praise for this book—that it is the definitive biography of Plath, the biography she’s always deserved—holds true, in my mind. To read Red Comet is to discover that Sylvia Plath the person—the writer—is so much more interesting and compelling than Sylvia Plath the icon of female hysteria.
Clark’s project is, in part, to refute the teleological narrative of Plath’s life that other biographies and writing about her rely on, which treat her death as the inevitable outcome of her life, with every moment pointing towards February 11th 1963. The image of Plath that has coincided with this treatment, of a mad poetess who existed as an almost supernatural vessel for poetry that came pouring out of her in her final months of life, is both sexist and dehumanizing, Clark argues.
Instead, she tells Plath’s life story by using her work as the guiding narrative: her career as a writer, her commitment to developing her craft, her desire to balance this work with being a wife and mother, and the political and social context she was writing in. What emerges is a portrait of a bright, ambitious, driven, and complex woman who desired so much in life, who I found exceptionally relatable.
Clark contends that not only should we consider Plath as one of the most important writers of the 20th century, we should also understand her specifically as a writer of the Cold War. It was fascinating to learn about Plath’s disdain for 1950s American militarism and nuclear aggression, and how her work connects nuclear anxiety with the patriarchal constraints placed on women.
Clark’s readings of Plath’s poems are exceptional—part of what made this book such a rewarding and memorable experience is that it has made me return to both The Bell Jar and her poetry; being able to track the changes in her developing voice and style in her Collected Poems alongside Clark’s narration of her life has been nothing short of extraordinary.
This biography is over 1,000 pages: I listened to it on audio, and it comes in at 45 hours. I would listen to it all over again in a heartbeat, and have ordered a physical copy that I can refer back to. What a profound, unforgettable reading experience.
December 8, 2020
This was so, so satisfying. I felt I finally understood what happened to Plath. Complete; compassionate.
December 20, 2020
I’m pretty sure this book had a million pages, so in my head it counts for at least three books toward my year-end goal.
If you are a Plathophile like me, you’ll love this book. It’s the first time I felt like Sylvia was a (reluctant) feminist. I also appreciate how the author pointed out the oppression and need from others for her to conform...when she clearly wasn’t like any other. I plan to reread The Bell Jar to see if it sits differently with me now that I’ve read this book.
If you are a Plathophile like me, you’ll love this book. It’s the first time I felt like Sylvia was a (reluctant) feminist. I also appreciate how the author pointed out the oppression and need from others for her to conform...when she clearly wasn’t like any other. I plan to reread The Bell Jar to see if it sits differently with me now that I’ve read this book.
August 18, 2021
I’m going to be perfectly honest. I gave up on this one. I think it really came down to the amount of detail. I can appreciate that Clark had a wealth of information at her fingertips and it was probably entirely too enticing not to include everything she possibly could. However, when inclusions were showing redundancy and not actually adding to the narrative, I found myself becoming frustrated.
December 19, 2020
According to my Goodreads records, this is the 6th Sylvia Plath biography I've read. The details of her life were not a mystery to me when I opened this book, though I hadn't revisited them for many years. Plath became an interest - closer to obsession - of mine in High School, when I found her haunting poems and dark novel the stuff of every 16 year old girl's fulfilled imagination. My (now) husband and I would go on to write about her during a summer research project during college, as part of a thesis entitled - "Imaginary Conversions: Post-Holocaust Jewish Identity in Four Non-Jewish Confessional Poets" (quite a mouthful I see now). We were granted access to her archives at Smith College, a trip I'll never forget. We gleefully, secretly, lifted the plastic coverings, touched ever-so-slightly her letters, her poems. When in London, we found the infamous Yeats flat, where Plath spent her last few months.
During those years I read many biographies - always disappointed. There was the bitter diatribe written by Anne Stevenson (and overseen - "almost as an act of co-authorship" Stevenson admitted - by Ted Hughes' sister, Olwyn, who had her own agenda when it came to Plath). There were the simplistic narratives of the more recent "American Isis" and "Mad Girl's Love Song." In these biographies the emphasis was either on Plath's madness or - ironically - on her normalcy, her "all-American" platinum summer and desire for domestic perfection. None seemed brave enough, or equipped enough, to grapple with the real depth, horror, and profundity of her poetry. And they almost always simplified the relationship with Hughes, the most important of her life - usually with Hughes coming out the unredeemed adulterer.
Plath's life was more complicated. Perhaps now, finally, in 2020, with enough distance between history and myth-making, we can view her a little more clearly. Heather Clark's biography had the unique advantage of full access to both the Hughes and Plath estates (a privilege not granted to earlier biographers) and the level of detail is astounding. Clark has written the first clear-eyed view of Plath in my estimation: as poet, mother, wife, and woman. She has astutely brought out the larger themes in Plath's work (often forgotten amidst the sensationalism of her life and death): materialism, nuclear war, the tension between art and motherhood, the mind-numbing capitalism of post 1950's industrial society. I especially appreciated the detailed and thorough attention to the poems themselves, which are granted pages of thorough analysis and careful reading.
As for Plath's personal life, Clark offers a nuanced, fair-minded account. Hughes is neither savior nor villain. He is, undoubtedly, the love of Plath's life, an incredible influence on her art, and also the man who hurt her perhaps beyond repair. With full access to Hughes' estate we are also granted access to his personal journals and letters, showing a complicated, fraught relationship. Yet amidst so many conflicts, neither Plath or Hughes ever doubted the other's talent and indeed were joint champions of each other's work, each owing an inestimable debt to the other in the development of their writing.
Clark also gives a steady-handed account of Plath's relationship with her mother Aurelia. Neither the bouncy, upbeat tone of "Letters Home" or the dark, destructive late-night thoughts of Plath's "Unabridged Journals" can give a full, accurate account of this complicated mother-daughter relationship. Undoubtedly, Dr. Beuscher - a morally ambiguous influence in Plath's life - helped Plath, for better or worse, to see her relationship with her mother in Freudian terms and also gave her a convenient outlet for her rage and grief (perhaps never fully dealt with as a young child when she lost her father). Aurelia, for her part, seems somewhat bewildered in Clark's account - doing all she can for the daughter she adores but almost inevitably saying and doing exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time.
The account of Plath's last few months are startling and raw. Reading this biography it was perhaps the first time I truly felt the immense tragedy of her suicide. At a distance of literary admiration it is easy to simply shake our heads - 'what a shame.' But when you've invested in some 800+ pages at that point, getting to know a complicated, unique individual, her death truly seems such an avoidable loss. The mythology goes that Plath wrote in a frenzy - that those last poems of "Ariel" were written in the white-hot glare of suicidal intention - and perhaps would have been impossible to write without their creator's inevitable destruction. Clark casts doubt on this narrative. Up until the very week of her death Plath was making long-term plans. She was signing contracts with the BBC, planning vacations abroad with friends, looking into a new nanny for the children, and working heavily on a new novel. She had also signed a 5 year contract on the Yeats apartment, hoping to one day buy the entire building and rent out flats.
This does not sound like a woman in complete despair. Yet she was undoubtedly unstable. Her separation from Hughes had challenged all her assumptions about her own life - and about the man she thought she knew better than anyone in the world. Hughes, who had betrayed her with a woman she saw as 'barren, manipulative, evil,' had also betrayed their shared ideals of the sacrament of the artistic marriage. Only 2% of households in 1962 were headed by single mothers. Plath felt alienated, humiliated.
Yet, per Clark's research, it really seems that it was the threat of institutionalization that made her feel she had no way out. Still suffering from PTSD after the mismanaged shock treatments Plath had received after her first suicide attempt in the 1950s, she had vowed to never trust herself to a psychiatric institution again. Her London doctor, a well-informed if perhaps ill-equipped, general practitioner had arranged for a bed for her at a well-respected institute. A nurse was to arrive that Monday morning to care for the children in Plath's absence. On a loaded cocktail of poorly interacting pills, Plath seemed to friends to be out-of-sorts, weepy, angry, unstable, invariably not herself. They tried to keep her from being home alone - indeed the night she died she was accompanied by one friend or neighbor or another until about 12:30 AM, but eventually Plath absolutely insisted on time to do laundry for the children and get things ready for the nurse.
So was it this fear of psychiatric institutionalization that drove Plath to her suicide? Perhaps. It also seems she was, in a strange way, protecting her children. Many of her drafts from the time include crossed out lines about her taking the children 'with her.' Some have surmised this was the reason Hughes burned those last few journal entries - that Plath had, at one point or another, contemplated also killing her children when she killed herself. It seems quite obvious now in 2020 that Plath was suffering from severe post-partum depression in addition to a host of other psychological ailments. The care with which she sealed off the children's room was never lost on those who found her on that cold morning. While many of Plath's poems express a desire for an escape from the 'drudgery' of motherhood, she also saw her children as the 'redemption' of her life. In her introduction to "Nick and the Candlestick" on the BBC she said: "In this poem... a mother nurses her baby son by candlelight and finds in him a beauty which, while it may not ward off the world's ills, does redeem her share of it." In the poem, she tells her son he is "the one / solid the spaces lean on ... You are the baby in the barn."
This is a thorough, engaging, well-written, impeccably researched biography. It saves Sylvia Plath from the myth she so often becomes, while giving due respect to the profundity of her art. Finally, a biography worthy of its subject!
During those years I read many biographies - always disappointed. There was the bitter diatribe written by Anne Stevenson (and overseen - "almost as an act of co-authorship" Stevenson admitted - by Ted Hughes' sister, Olwyn, who had her own agenda when it came to Plath). There were the simplistic narratives of the more recent "American Isis" and "Mad Girl's Love Song." In these biographies the emphasis was either on Plath's madness or - ironically - on her normalcy, her "all-American" platinum summer and desire for domestic perfection. None seemed brave enough, or equipped enough, to grapple with the real depth, horror, and profundity of her poetry. And they almost always simplified the relationship with Hughes, the most important of her life - usually with Hughes coming out the unredeemed adulterer.
Plath's life was more complicated. Perhaps now, finally, in 2020, with enough distance between history and myth-making, we can view her a little more clearly. Heather Clark's biography had the unique advantage of full access to both the Hughes and Plath estates (a privilege not granted to earlier biographers) and the level of detail is astounding. Clark has written the first clear-eyed view of Plath in my estimation: as poet, mother, wife, and woman. She has astutely brought out the larger themes in Plath's work (often forgotten amidst the sensationalism of her life and death): materialism, nuclear war, the tension between art and motherhood, the mind-numbing capitalism of post 1950's industrial society. I especially appreciated the detailed and thorough attention to the poems themselves, which are granted pages of thorough analysis and careful reading.
As for Plath's personal life, Clark offers a nuanced, fair-minded account. Hughes is neither savior nor villain. He is, undoubtedly, the love of Plath's life, an incredible influence on her art, and also the man who hurt her perhaps beyond repair. With full access to Hughes' estate we are also granted access to his personal journals and letters, showing a complicated, fraught relationship. Yet amidst so many conflicts, neither Plath or Hughes ever doubted the other's talent and indeed were joint champions of each other's work, each owing an inestimable debt to the other in the development of their writing.
Clark also gives a steady-handed account of Plath's relationship with her mother Aurelia. Neither the bouncy, upbeat tone of "Letters Home" or the dark, destructive late-night thoughts of Plath's "Unabridged Journals" can give a full, accurate account of this complicated mother-daughter relationship. Undoubtedly, Dr. Beuscher - a morally ambiguous influence in Plath's life - helped Plath, for better or worse, to see her relationship with her mother in Freudian terms and also gave her a convenient outlet for her rage and grief (perhaps never fully dealt with as a young child when she lost her father). Aurelia, for her part, seems somewhat bewildered in Clark's account - doing all she can for the daughter she adores but almost inevitably saying and doing exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time.
The account of Plath's last few months are startling and raw. Reading this biography it was perhaps the first time I truly felt the immense tragedy of her suicide. At a distance of literary admiration it is easy to simply shake our heads - 'what a shame.' But when you've invested in some 800+ pages at that point, getting to know a complicated, unique individual, her death truly seems such an avoidable loss. The mythology goes that Plath wrote in a frenzy - that those last poems of "Ariel" were written in the white-hot glare of suicidal intention - and perhaps would have been impossible to write without their creator's inevitable destruction. Clark casts doubt on this narrative. Up until the very week of her death Plath was making long-term plans. She was signing contracts with the BBC, planning vacations abroad with friends, looking into a new nanny for the children, and working heavily on a new novel. She had also signed a 5 year contract on the Yeats apartment, hoping to one day buy the entire building and rent out flats.
This does not sound like a woman in complete despair. Yet she was undoubtedly unstable. Her separation from Hughes had challenged all her assumptions about her own life - and about the man she thought she knew better than anyone in the world. Hughes, who had betrayed her with a woman she saw as 'barren, manipulative, evil,' had also betrayed their shared ideals of the sacrament of the artistic marriage. Only 2% of households in 1962 were headed by single mothers. Plath felt alienated, humiliated.
Yet, per Clark's research, it really seems that it was the threat of institutionalization that made her feel she had no way out. Still suffering from PTSD after the mismanaged shock treatments Plath had received after her first suicide attempt in the 1950s, she had vowed to never trust herself to a psychiatric institution again. Her London doctor, a well-informed if perhaps ill-equipped, general practitioner had arranged for a bed for her at a well-respected institute. A nurse was to arrive that Monday morning to care for the children in Plath's absence. On a loaded cocktail of poorly interacting pills, Plath seemed to friends to be out-of-sorts, weepy, angry, unstable, invariably not herself. They tried to keep her from being home alone - indeed the night she died she was accompanied by one friend or neighbor or another until about 12:30 AM, but eventually Plath absolutely insisted on time to do laundry for the children and get things ready for the nurse.
So was it this fear of psychiatric institutionalization that drove Plath to her suicide? Perhaps. It also seems she was, in a strange way, protecting her children. Many of her drafts from the time include crossed out lines about her taking the children 'with her.' Some have surmised this was the reason Hughes burned those last few journal entries - that Plath had, at one point or another, contemplated also killing her children when she killed herself. It seems quite obvious now in 2020 that Plath was suffering from severe post-partum depression in addition to a host of other psychological ailments. The care with which she sealed off the children's room was never lost on those who found her on that cold morning. While many of Plath's poems express a desire for an escape from the 'drudgery' of motherhood, she also saw her children as the 'redemption' of her life. In her introduction to "Nick and the Candlestick" on the BBC she said: "In this poem... a mother nurses her baby son by candlelight and finds in him a beauty which, while it may not ward off the world's ills, does redeem her share of it." In the poem, she tells her son he is "the one / solid the spaces lean on ... You are the baby in the barn."
This is a thorough, engaging, well-written, impeccably researched biography. It saves Sylvia Plath from the myth she so often becomes, while giving due respect to the profundity of her art. Finally, a biography worthy of its subject!
March 3, 2023
Incredible! Heather Clark navigates the mire of Sylvia Plath's enduring romanticization and the fandom surrounding her's aestheticization of death as something beautiful and alluring, mystical and powerful. Instead, Clark maintains lucidity and a searing critical eye throughout such a variety of documentation (letters, journals, diaries, interviews, poems, primary and secondary school exams, juvenilia, etc.) that this tome of a book feels deceptively easy to read. The level of comprehensiveness! The ability to defy standard narratives! The denial of easy labels! The further problematization of Plath's legacy! It's just incredibly eye-opening. My whole consideration of Sylvia Plath has been shifted by Clark's insights. Clark argues that Sylvia Plath is not in fact... a truly confessional poet. She is, but she is not. I think everyone can love this behemoth of a biography (and I'm rather surprised this did not go on to win the Pulitzer for Biography, even though it did attain a finalist slot). I don't know how to encapsulate how all-encompassing this book is as a sociocultural history of mid-century America, literary historiography, literary criticism (and a reflection of the rise of New Criticism), a comparative examination of American and British poetry (and the countries' differing relations to class/caste and sexism), and a metatext on the Plath legacy, all without veering into hagiography. How can one not swoon?
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