Clark claims better and deeper access to Plath’s unpublished writings (particularly related to Hughes) than prior biographers, and if that sometimes means she is persnickety about Plath’s day-by-day (if not hour-by-hour) activities, the approach avoids sloppy armchair psychoanalysis. Yet her conflicts also motivated her a whirlwind marriage to the British poet Ted Hughes stoked her iconoclasm while also providing entry into the boys club of literary Britain. Her warring urges took a toll early: In 1953, following a harrowing round of electroshock therapy, she attempted suicide, an experience repurposed for her novel The Bell Jar. To make her case, the author meticulously explores Plath’s omnivorous literary interests and busy social life she was a creative writer who craved liberation as well as a high-achieving Smith College student and prim Mademoiselle magazine intern who sought solace in conformity.
“Plath took herself and her desires seriously in a world that often refused to do so,” writes Clark. Even so, Clark, a longtime Plath scholar, is determined to extricate the poet from the prison of a reputation as a “witchy death-goddess” and reframe her as a serious, wide-ranging artist with prodigious expressive powers. The story of Sylvia Plath’s (1932-1963) life is inseparable from her tragic death: She committed suicide in London at 30, leaving behind a body of poetry and fiction often shaped by depression, rage, and heartbreak. A sober and detailed critical biography of one of the 20th century’s greatest and most misunderstood poets.
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