This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt. You may receive a partial or no refund on used, damaged or materially different returns.

Read full return policy

Payment

Secure transaction

Payment

Secure transaction

We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more

Details

$13.34

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns

Little to no damage on cover or pages. Item will come in original packaging. Little to no damage on cover or pages. Item will come in original packaging. See less

FREE delivery Wednesday, June 12 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35

Arrives before Father's Day

Select delivery location

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.

$$15.48 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Enhancements you chose aren't available for this seller. Details

${cardName} not available for the seller you chose

${cardName} unavailable for quantities greater than ${maxQuantity}.

Sold by Amazon Warehouse and Fulfilled by Amazon.

Other sellers on Amazon

New & Used (78) from $8.04 + $3.99 shipping

Follow the author

Heather L. Clark

Follow

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath Hardcover – Deckle Edge, October 27, 2020

by Heather Clark (Author)

4.7 1,027 ratings

See all formats and editions

Sorry, there was a problem loading this page. Try again.

Great on Kindle

Great Experience. Great Value.

Enjoy a great reading experience when you buy the Kindle edition of this book. Learn more about Great on Kindle, available in select categories.

View Kindle Edition

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$15.48","priceAmount":15.48,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"15","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"48","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"lTV15d3%2FLgXyAScTzO76%2FfO9%2BuHg2vsPPFz9oZ0sEw2cuuHbJQVxxI5pMuvU4UECoN6eZtukguYBmSrIzFU6F1Ourfq2cJfJ96%2FKDYn%2BnwHYwukzojiqhIO%2Ff7AwviTXz%2FAP2aSXMk%2BSafStDYYgXQPQelUJ8Qj8Y1z9qU0piW0JHopVUkxodg%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"$13.34","priceAmount":13.34,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"13","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"34","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"lTV15d3%2FLgXyAScTzO76%2FfO9%2BuHg2vsP7l00mF%2B72aClKVglscrjYyXY299kt4fe9U%2B6PJ9PKqYQOviufHlBk5Sw0z%2BGMok0J0bG7uCTCyS3kOF1vxU4FcmObSGHrwyNSQofbkINyhwU%2F%2BVF5x9XMvU5MjNKL8VlrqEjesAJQsUn24HaWgK5Sf5joADbEGwc","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • The highly anticipated biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art.

“One of the most beautiful biographies I've ever read." —Glennon Doyle, author of #1 New York Times Bestseller, Untamed

With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials, Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant Sylvia Plath, who had precocious poetic ambition and was an accomplished published writer even before she became a star at Smith College. Refusing to read Plath’s work as if her every act was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark considers the sociopolitical context as she thoroughly explores Plath’s world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her troubles with an unenlightened mental health industry; her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes; and much more.

Clark’s clear-eyed portraits of Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath’s suicide promote a deeper understanding of her final days. 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.

Print length

1152 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Knopf
Publication date

October 27, 2020
Dimensions

6.75 x 2 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

0307961168
ISBN-13

978-0307961167
See all details

Frequently bought together

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

$16.99

Get it as soon as Monday, Jun 10

In Stock

Sold by __hopefulness__ and ships from Amazon Fulfillment.

+

$16.99

Get it as soon as Monday, Jun 10

In Stock

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

+

$14.67

Get it as soon as Monday, Jun 10

In Stock

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

Total price:

To see our price, add these items to your cart.

Try again!

Details

Added to Cart

These items are shipped from and sold by different sellers.

Show details Hide details

Choose items to buy together.

Sylvia Plath
1,652
Paperback
89 offers from $3.86
Sylvia Plath
27,240
Paperback
126 offers from $3.89
Sylvia Plath
1,249
Paperback
86 offers from $8.56
Sylvia Plath
1,422
Paperback
91 offers from $5.95
Sylvia Plath
176
Hardcover
1 offer from $30.82
Sylvia Plath
73
Paperback
57 offers from $4.16

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

A New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the LA Times Book Prize • A New York Times Notable Book • Named aBook of the Year: O, the Oprah Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Boston Globe, Literary Hub, The Times (London), The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph,and The Times of India • Winner of the Biographers' Club Slightly Foxed Prize for Best First Biography

“Mesmerizing . . . Comprehensive . . . Stuffed with heretofore untold anecdotes that illuminate or extend our understanding of Plath’s life . . . Clark is a felicitous writer and a discerning critic of Plath’s poetry . . . There is no denying the book’s intellectual power and, just as important, its sheer readability.”
—The New York Times

“A majestic tome with the narrative propulsion of a thriller. We now have the complete story.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine

“An exhaustively researched, frequently brilliant masterwork. . . . It is an impressive achievement representing a prizeworthy contribution to literary scholarship and biographical journalism.”
—The Washington Post

“One of the most beautiful biographies I've ever read."
—Glennon Doyle, author of #1 New York Times Bestseller, Untamed

“Clark masterfully analyzes the poetry with intelligent incorporation of the biography. . . . Red Comet shows that the achievement of Sylvia Plath was miraculous—but it wasn’t spasmodic, or rare. It was hard-won, every single day.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Massive, insightful . . . Red Comet is a critical examination of what it means to be a female artist, to suffer from depression, and to be alone, as it is revelatory about this one particular life and the art that came from it. The red comet (an image from her poem ‘Stings’) is an apt metaphor for Plath.”
—Boston Globe

“Revelatory. . . . Plath’s struggles with depression and her marriage to Ted Hughes emerge in complex detail, but Clark does not let Plath’s suicide define her artistic achievement, arguing with refreshing rigor for her significance to modern letters. The result is a new understanding and appreciation of an innovative, uncompromising poetic voice.”
—The New Yorker

“A definitive biography. . . . What ultimately bursts off the page is Plath’s short, vibrant life, which is too often most remembered for the way it ended: ‘That’s the irony, isn’t it?’ says Clark. ‘She’s so incredibly alive.’”
—Entertainment Weekly

“Red Comet is absolutely necessary. . . . In Clark’s attentive hands, Plath’s life is laid out in its full complexity.”
—Lit Hub

“Aiming to shake the public perception of Sylvia Plath as ‘the Marilyn Monroe of the literati,’ Clark delivers a meticulous, unflinching and fresh view of the brilliant, troubled poet.”
—People

“Surely the final, the definitive, biography of Sylvia Plath . . . Takes its time in desensationalizing the life and the art; this lets Clark place both firmly in the literary and politically engaged contexts that formed them and simultaneously demonstrate how Plath’s work, in return, gifted the writing life unimaginable new sinew.”
—The Guardian (“The Best Books of 2020”)

“Red Comet is a mighty achievement. Clark is compassionate, clear-eyed, sceptical. Each chapter reads with the ease of a novel. . . . Plath’s resilience, genius and insight blaze through the book.”
—The Times (UK)

“Clark entices us with the impossible: an ‘unbiased,’ authorised biography of Sylvia Plath. . . . Red Comet is the kind of serious literary biography Plath has long deserved but, until now, not received.”
—New Statesman (UK)

“Unlike other biographies of Plath (1932-63), Clark’s traces her subject’s literary and intellectual development rather than concentrating on her undoing through suicide. . . . A masterful biography, that will especially interest literary scholars.”
—Library Journal

“[A] page-turning, meticulously researched biography of Sylvia Plath. . . . Clark’s in-depth scholarship and fine writing result in a superb work that will deliver fresh revelations to Plath’s many devoted fans.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A sober and detailed critical biography of one of the 20th century’s greatest and most misunderstood poets. . . . Redeems Plath from the condescension of easy interpretation.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Once I started reading this book, I couldn’t stop; I read it upon waking and late at night, at the dinner table and during the workday. I thought I knew Plath, but this wonderful book shows me I did not. Like the lyric speakers of her late poetry, she emerges from these pages transformed. Red Comet presents Sylvia Plath as she ought to be: as an innovative, ambitious, driven artist, at a time when women weren’t supposed to be any of these things. In the end, I was awestruck by Plath’s courage and strength in the face of so many obstacles; I was awed, too, by the work Clark has done to bring this writer to life.”
—Maggie Doherty, author of The Equivalents

About the Author

HEATHER CLARK earned her bachelor's degree in English literature from Harvard University and her doctorate in English from Oxford University. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowship, a Leon Levy Biography Fellowship at the City University of New York, and a Visiting US Fellowship at the Eccles Centre for American Studies, British Library. A former visiting scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, she is the author of The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962-1972. Her work has appeared in publications including Harvard Review, Times Literary Supplement, Time, AirMail, and LitHub, and she recently served as the scholarly consultant for the BBC documentary Sylvia Plath: Life Inside the Bell Jar. She divides her time between Chappaqua, New York, and Yorkshire, England, where she is a professor of contemporary poetry at the University of Huddersfield.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

The Beekeeper’s Daughter
Prussia, Austria, America, 1850–1932

Like Sylvia Plath herself, Plath’s parents, Otto and Aurelia, have had to bear a difficult posthumous burden. Plath used her parents, like so many others in her life, as material for her writing. They existed as real people whose praise she craved and, at the same time, a deep fictional resource. They were of her, but not her—a looking glass that reflected the possibility of what might or might not be, and she could not resist plumbing their depths as she sought to understand her own. She came to feel that in her parents lay the root of her anxieties, and, encouraged by her psychiatrist in the late fifties, she began to lash out at them in her journals and, later, her poems. Plath would express rage toward her parents—at her father for abandoning her, at her mother for hovering too close. They remain distorted caricatures, stuck in amber. In Plath’s most famous poem, “Daddy,” Otto—who died when she was eight—is a patriarchal tyrant, a Nazi “bastard.” Aurelia, skewered in The Bell Jar, is a menacing martyr who demands perfection from her daughter. But if Plath inherited anxiety and depression from her parents, she also inherited intelligence, discipline, and ambition. They stand Janus-faced, curse and blessing, at the beginning and end of Sylvia Plath’s story.

In Otto Plath’s case, myth has overshadowed truth in the popular imagination. For many readers of Sylvia Plath, Otto Plath is “Daddy”: Aryan, fascist, Nazi. In fact, Otto Plath was a committed pacifist who renounced his German citizenship in 1926 and watched Hitler’s rise with trepidation. He held himself to rigid moral standards and expected others to do the same. In a photograph taken when he was a college student in Wisconsin, around 1910, he gives the impression of a man who does not suffer fools gladly. He sits unsmiling in the front row surrounded by drunken peers, laughing and holding steins. This is the serious, driven young man who would not compromise his ideals, even if that meant severing ties with his family—a decision that would have a profound impact on his daughter.

At least three generations of the Plath family lived in Posen Province, West Prussia, before coming to America. Today Posen (Poznan) is part of Poland, in the area known as the “Polish Corridor” when it was transferred from the German empire to Poland after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Like the Alsace-Lorraine region, it became a disputed territory, where tensions between ethnic Poles and Germans ran high. Despite the fact that the majority of those living in this area were Poles, Hitler attempted to annex it in 1939—one of the early acts of aggression that spurred France, Britain, and other Commonwealth nations to declare war on Germany. Though Otto Plath left Posen in 1900, well before both world wars, his daughter would eventually portray him as an embodiment of German imperialist aggression in “Daddy.”

Posen, whose population comprised Germans, Poles, and Jews who lived in separate ethnic enclaves, was perhaps the poorest region in Prussia. By the late 1800s, ethnic Germans, lured by the booming industrial economy in the Rhine and Ruhr regions, as well as free land in America, began leaving the region en masse in the Ostflucht, or “flight from the east.” More than two million had left by the early 1900s, including Sylvia Plath’s paternal great-grandparents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and father. Her great-grandfather, Johann Plath, was an illiterate farmer, but his grandson Otto would eventually become a Harvard-educated professor, and his great-granddaughter a trailblazing poet and novelist. Sylvia’s “perfectionism,” often derided as neurotic or pathological, needs to be understood within the historical and sociological context of the American immigrant experience, which framed her life. Her desire to excel on all fronts has its roots in the Germanic aspirational work ethic that was her inheritance.

Otto Plath’s German provenance was important to his daughter. Sylvia wrote that she felt her “German background very strongly,” and talked up her German-Austrian roots to her German pen pal, Hans-Joachim Neupert, in high school. “I feel a strong kinship for anything German,” she told him in 1949. “I think that it is the most beautiful language in the world, and whenever I meet anyone with a German name or German traits, I have a sudden secret warmth.” She felt “patriotic pride” when she read German authors such as Thomas Mann and spoke lovingly of her grandmother’s hearty Austrian cooking. She was well aware of the dazzling artistic and intellectual achievements of German musicians, writers, and philosophers; she listened to Bach and Beethoven, and read Nietzsche and Goethe with her mother. But hers was a dual inheritance, for she had also heard how her mother’s family was harassed during the First World War by Irish and Italian neighbors in Winthrop, Massachusetts. Sylvia may have been picked on for similar reasons during the Second World War and possibly nervous that members of her family would be sent to a domestic detention camp for German Americans. (Her father was, in fact, detained by the FBI for alleged pro-German sympathies in 1918.) In December 1958, she described a short-story plot in her journal—which eventually became “The Shadow”—about a young German American girl who is treated suspiciously by her neighbors during the Second World War:

My present theme seems to be the awareness of a complicated guilt system whereby Germans in a Jewish and Catholic community are made to feel, in a scapegoat fashion, the pain, psychically, the Jews are made to feel in Germany by Germans without religion. The child can’t understand the larger framework. How does her father come into this? How is she guilty for her father’s deportation to a detention camp? As this is how I think the story must end?

These questions suggest that Sylvia understood from a young age that the German identity she shared with her father was somehow dangerous—a secret source of shame.

Plath’s journals are full of frustration about her inability to master the German language. In January 1953 she regrets not having taken more German in college; in February 1956 she wants to “revive German again,” declaring, “I haven’t really worked at learning it”; she vows to spend the summer of 1957 studying the language; in 1958 she berates herself for “wasting my German hours” and writes, “to learn that would be a great triumph for me.”In 1960, exhausted and homesick in London, she was comforted by her German-speaking friend Helga Huws, whose German cooking made her weep. As late as 1962, she listened to German linguaphone records and tuned into a BBC German radio program. She hired a German-speaking au pair shortly before her death in 1963.

Sylvia was the daughter of a German immigrant and a first-generation Austrian who had studied German language and literature and knew Middle High German. Her mother’s parents, the Schobers, with whom she lived in Wellesley, spoke German at home. Despite her exposure to the language—and the fact that she excelled at every other academic subject—German did not come easily to her. In her 1962 poem “Daddy,” the German language itself becomes the “barb wire snare” and “the language obscene,” “An engine, an engine / Chuffing me off like a Jew” to the death camps. Plath’s notorious metaphorical appropriation of Jewishness may not have been a fantasy of victimization, but rather a fantasy of purgation and purity: only by aligning her speaker with the enemy of the Germans could she reject her own Germanness, which, in the wake of the Holocaust, seemed like a curse.

Previous biographers have stated that the Plath name was originally “Platt,” and that it was anglicized on entry to America. According to a family member, the family name in Germany was von Plath. Sylvia’s paternal great-grandparents, John (Johann) von Plath and Caroline (Katrina) Katzsezmadek, were born in the Posen region in 1829 and 1826, respectively. John was German and Lutheran, Caroline Polish and Catholic, but the couple overcame the religious divide to marry in the 1850s. They raised their children as Lutherans, though there was religious tension within the marriage. Both spoke Polish and German; in later years, Otto would list both languages as his mother tongue. The couple settled in the small town of Budsin, now Budzyn, in Posen Province. They had eight children, of whom Otto’s father, Theodore (b. 1850), was the eldest. The six children who survived into adulthood—Emil, Augusta, Mathilde, Mary, Emilie, and Theodore—all immigrated to America between 1882 and 1901 and settled across the West and Midwest in North Dakota, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Oregon.

The fact that all of John and Caroline’s children emigrated suggests that the family did not prosper in Posen. In America they became blacksmiths and seamstresses, their spouses railroad laborers and meat cutters. Mary Plath endured a particularly dark fate. According to a family story, she fell in love with a young man from Cando, a neighboring town in North Dakota, while she was visiting her relatives in Maza. She became pregnant by him, but he left her for another woman in Cando. Jilted and alone, she ran away to a boardinghouse in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she died in childbirth. Mary’s lonely death speaks to the cost of veering from traditional Lutheran codes of behavior. (Later, one of Mary’s nieces expressed guilt over her aunt’s sad fate.) Otto, too, would be cast out after his peregrinations from the faith.

In their fifties and sixties, John and Caroline decided to follow their children across the Atlantic, and they immigrated to the Lincoln–Fall Creek area of Wisconsin, where they had Posen connections, in the 1880s. Immigration officials struck the “von” from the Plath surname when John landed in New York. When he protested that the prefix was a matter of “family pride,” the immigration official replied, “there is no aristocracy in America!”

John and Caroline were uneducated: neither could read, write, nor speak fluent English even after living in America for two decades. “They were poor people when they came to Fall Creek,” a resident said. Yet by farming and taking in boarders such as the local public school teacher, they were able to buy a house and eventually help their grandson Otto come to America. Caroline, who had “deep-set intense eyes,” died in Fall Creek in November 1913. John died two years later, in June 1915, the year his grandson Otto turned thirty. They were hearty people who lived into their eighties at a time when life expectancy was much shorter. An undated photograph shows John and Caroline seated on stools outdoors, probably in their yard, while a young Otto and his aunt Emilie stand stiffly behind. Otto, with his jacket, vest, tie, and neatly combed hair, embodies the grandson made good. John, however, wears a dark, rumpled suit, while Caroline and Emilie are in plain, faded housedresses. The grandparents’ stern, weathered faces look straight out of American Gothic.

John and Caroline’s eldest child, Theodore Friedrich Plath, married Ernestine Kottke (b. 1853) in a Protestant church in Posen Province in 1882. He was thirty-two, and she was twenty-nine—a rather late marriage for the time. Ernestine was Otto’s mother and Sylvia Plath’s grandmother. Otto remembered his mother as “a rather melancholy person . . . weighed down with the care of six children and an ulcer on her leg that never wholly healed.” He described Theodore, however, as “energetic, jovial, inventive.” Ernestine and Theodore had six children: Otto, Paul, Max Theodore, Hugo, Martha, and Frieda, all born between 1885 and 1896. Another child, born when Ernestine was just nineteen and possibly out of wedlock, died. Ernestine raised the children on her own for long stretches of time while her husband sold equipment for the McCormick company in Germany, Poland, France, and Russia. Theodore picked up several languages during his travels and was able to converse easily with his clients; his son Otto would inherit his linguistic talents.

Theodore’s job in Germany was steady and well paid, but around the turn of the century McCormick was restructured, and family members later speculated that Theodore had been laid off or was unhappy with the changes in the company. Theodore left Hamburg on March 3, 1901, on the Batavia and arrived in New York sixteen days later. He listed his occupation in the ship’s log as “master blacksmith.” At fifty, he was the last of the Plath siblings to emigrate. He arrived with $125, no contract of employment, and plans to stay with his sister Mathilde and her husband in Chicago. Ernestine sailed from Liverpool to St. John, Canada, on the RMS Lake Ontario in December 1901 with five of her six young children. She moved first to Maza, North Dakota, where Theodore’s brother Emil worked as a blacksmith, and where at some point she reunited with her husband. They lived in Maza until 1906 or 1907. By 1907, the couple was living in Harney, Oregon, and by 1912, Oregon City. Theodore worked as a blacksmith and farmer.

From this time on Ernestine vanishes both from the general record and from family anecdote. Sylvia’s mother Aurelia said that after Sylvia’s suicide attempt in 1953, Otto’s sister Frieda wrote to her confiding that their mother Ernestine had been hospitalized for depression, and that a sister and niece had also suffered from the illness. According to Frieda, they had “all made some sort of recovery.” Yet this was not quite true. Ernestine Plath died in September 1919 at the Oregon Hospital for the Insane.

Theodore had committed her to the Salem asylum in October 1916. She was sixty-three. According to the admission form he filled out, her physical and mental health had been “normal” until 1905, when she suffered her first episode of “insanity” in North Dakota. The symptoms then had consisted of “head-ache, sleep and appetite loss, and anxious as persecution [sic].” Theodore stated that Ernestine had received treatment for this condition in Jamestown, North Dakota, in 1905, but that the same symptoms had recently reappeared. His wife had no previous history of suicidal thoughts or attempts, he wrote—no seizures or fits, no history of alcohol or drug abuse, and no hint of violent temperament. Her general disposition was, according to court records, “Good when well.”

The admitting doctor found Ernestine reluctant to speak with him, and “much depressed & fearful. . . . Appears to be hallucinated but will not converse.” The admitting nurse further noted that she was “well nourished, clean but helpless.” She was also, the nurse thought, depressed. Another set of hospital admission notes observed that the brown-haired, blue-eyed, five-foot-five-inch, 130-pound woman “Gets out of bed at unreasonable periods . . . Thinks someone might kill her, begs to stay with us. Worrys [sic] for fear we will send her away.” The admitting doctor’s provisional diagnosis was “senile dementia."

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf; First Edition (October 27, 2020)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 1152 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0307961168
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307961167
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.6 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.75 x 2 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #328,029 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #925 in Literary Criticism & Theory
- #1,444 in Author Biographies
- #3,500 in Women's Biographies

Customer Reviews:
4.7 1,027 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Heather L. Clark

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5

1,027 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Reviews with images

See all photos

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Emma Scott

A tremendous achievement

Reviewed in the United States on January 1, 2022

Verified Purchase

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.

52 people found this helpful

Helpful

Opsimath

Eminently readable, fascinating

Reviewed in the United States on November 6, 2020

Verified Purchase

I would never have thought I'd stay up until two in the morning unable to put down a doorstopper of a biography, but I did on several nights with this one.

As other reviewers have said, this biography is far more comprehensive than previous biographies. But for me, the main fascination was the way Clark linked Plath's -- and Hughes's -- taste for and interest in violence, which pre-dated their meeting, with their relationship, the natural world, and their artistic goal of dismantling what they considered a superficial, almost prissy modernist poetic tradition in the UK. This takes the whole issue of violence out of the exclusively personal realm in which it has often been discussed (was Hughes physical violent, what do we make of Plath's accusation that a fight caused her to miscarry) and situates it as a vital part of their creative endeavors.

Clark also does a superb job of laying out precisely what Plath was up against in terms of sexism in the literary world. Not only was she battling a cultural assumption that women would inevitably become wives and mothers, that this would be their primary role -- Adlai Stevenson told Plath's graduating class exactly this in his speech at Smith -- but the publishing world was also soaked in assumptions about what were proper topics for women writers and what language it was appropriate to use to discuss them. Plath had a somewhat doubled relationship to this sexism, both resenting it and at times subordinating herself to Hughes, whom she considered the higher talent. The intricacies of their artistic marriage of minds also gets close attention, so that we see Plath both grateful for, gushing over, that closeness as well as beginning quite early on to have misgivings about its effect on her own work.

A couple of other aspects I valued highly: Clark analyzes the way Plath's longing to break free of codes of domesticity, her fear of being hampered by a family, her desire for a free-wheeling life of travel and freelancing, co-existed with her attraction toward a secure income, domestic skills, particularly cooking, and her later reveling in pregnancy, motherhood, fertility. Also this was the first biography I've read to thoroughly explore the unorthodox relationship Plath had with Dr. Beuscher, as well as putting Beuscher's advice and analysis into the context of the Jungian analysis -- particularly the blaming of mothers -- that was dominant at the time. Most of all, I was impressed by the tracing of the evolution of Plath's poetic style and philosophy over the years, how the seeds of her later work were planted at various stages and how they evolved.

This is the first major biography to be written since Olwyn Hughes's death, and one thing I would have really liked, given Olwyn's well-documented attempts to control what was said about Hughes and Plath by various biographers, and the difficulty getting permissions to quote extensively from their work, would have been an explanation of the impact of this new situation was. Neither Carol or Frieda Hughes are listed in the acknowledgments as having talked with Clark or in association with any permissions to quote from any work. But that's just me; I've long been fascinated with the power Olwyn Hughes had over Plath's estate and her sometimes bizarre interactions with biographers.

This is, in the end, the first page-turner megalith biography I've ever read.

117 people found this helpful

Helpful

SC shopper

Start here

Reviewed in the United States on October 22, 2023

Verified Purchase

Several biographies of SP are available -- this one is by far the best, superseding the others in terms of depth and breadth. The author has no agenda (as SP's previous biographers seem to have had) other than to provide, in exquisitely clear prose, the most detailed and fairest critical biography of her brilliant and complex subject.

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Mrs. B.

Gripping and researched with extraordinary care.

Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2022

Verified Purchase

I almost didn't buy this book. After all, I had nearly 40 books by/and/about Sylvia and Ted. You might say I'm passionately interested in them. I thought I knew what there was to know. But this is a masterpiece of scholarship.... I cannot believe the research here... tons of footnotes in the back. (Every so often, I said, how can the author possibly know this, and I looked in the back, and it was answered.). But unlike many profoundly researched books, this is WELL-WRITTEN, unput-downable. I find it not only expanded my knowledge of the subject, but changed views that I had developed over the years. I can't recommend this book highly enough to people who are already interested in this story of a remarkable poet who changed the direction of twentieth century poetry especially (but not confined to) as written by women. I had never heard of the author before... and I look forward to whatever she tackles next.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English

Don Palmer

This book is a brick but worth every word

Reviewed in Canada on October 9, 2022

Verified Purchase

I have read every biography on Sylvia Plath's life that I could find having been a big fan of the poet since my university days in the 1970's.
With the passing of Ted and Olwyn Hughes it seems that some of the material previously restricted by the family has been unlocked. As a result this book seems to offer a more balanced view on the relationship between these two legendary poets and their immediate family and friends.
Too many earlier biographies have been forced to rely on limited material, or even worse, have been designed to fit a specific perspective. They tend to be too one-sided, written by through a specific lens; often demonizing Ted H. for his infidelity and as a result presenting a very one-sided opinion of Sylvia's suicide, making her out to be a hapless victim.
Dr. Clark delves into her life before her marriage, and while not a biography on Ted Hughes, it provides an important overview of who he was and how he interacted with Sylvia in both the ups and downs of the relationship.
Heather Clark presents a round, multi-viewed vision of the two lives of these poets together, making it clear that it takes two to tango, even if it only takes one to die.
When I purchased the book, I thought that a 937 page biography on someone who only lived for 30 years would be stuffed with superfluous filler. It isn't!
The author indulges in extensive research which took her years. The result is review of a life that makes you feel you knew the poetess personally and had been exposed to everyone of significance in her orbit.
Aside from writing a well balanced, detailed and very non-judgemental biography, Dr. Clark suggests that in the future more documents will likely come to light, allow future biographers to build on her work. It is nice to see a biographer that acknowledges that hers may not be the definitive one.
There is so much in this biography that it is impossible to cover the many perspectives. Having worked in the field of mental health for 30 years, I found Dr. Clark's analysis of the psychiatric profession during the 60s and 70's provided a very important perspective on the life story.
If you are a fan of Sylvia Plath's poetry and want to get an overview of the post-war literary period in the U.S. and U.K. this book is an absolute must!

2 people found this helpful

Victória C

Ótima qualidade!

Reviewed in Brazil on October 28, 2021

Verified Purchase

Ótimo livro. Letra com um bom tamanho e papel creme. Papel sem textura, bem liso.
Comprei a versão em capa comum por ser melhor para manusear, afinal são mais de mil páginas. Super recomendo!

9 people found this helpful

Translate review to English

CN

the best book on Plath

Reviewed in Germany on June 4, 2023

Verified Purchase

This is by a country mile the best book on the subject; a few books have been written about the tragic poet, and I have read many of them. While I am not a native speaker, i can only encourage any german reader to dare to go for this, as the author writes with fantastic insight, new sources, a fresh view and a distant yet sympethetic look onto Plath. Plath of course committed suicide way before i was even born, but as this book impressively demonstrates, not all was - and maybe is? - told about her. Def a book not to be missed.

Frank

Biografia-Poesia americana-eminismo

Reviewed in Italy on November 9, 2020

Verified Purchase

Well writen with some new prospectives about the background of Silvia Plath. The autor has a good ointend to disolve the different stereotypes, that literature rechearch and mythical thinking has constructed and project on the life and work of one of the most creative poets and writers in the US of 19. century.
The books gives you very specific information about her personality, without loosing ground with the central aspects of her biography.
It's more than worth the price. I recomand it.

S. L. Anthony

Outstanding

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 18, 2020

Verified Purchase

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 were disastrous.

25 people found this helpful

See more reviews

Return this item for free

Image Unavailable

Follow the author

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath Hardcover – Deckle Edge, October 27, 2020

Purchase options and add-ons

Frequently bought together

Similar items that may ship from close to you

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Product details

Videos

About the author

Heather L. Clark

Customer reviews

Reviews with images

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries