Rescuing Sylvia Plath from the cult of her fans. Each chapter reads with the ease of a novel. Clark is compassionate, clear-eyed, sceptical. Publisher: Vintage Publishing ISBN: 9781787332539 Number of pages: 1152 Weight: 1468 g Dimensions: 240 x 162 x 53 mm MEDIA REVIEWSĪ first-class biography. 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*ĭetermined 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.Ĭlark'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. *WINNER OF THE SLIGHTLY FOXED PRIZE 2021* “Red Comet” reviews the evidence but offers an apologia from Frieda Hughes, who contends that “my father was not the wife-beater that some would wish to imagine he was.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. Another episode, which Plath described in no uncertain terms, occurred in February 1961, when Hughes beat Plath so severely she suffered a miscarriage. “I remember,” Plath wrote, “hurling a glass with all my force across a dark room instead of shattering the glass rebounded and remained intact: I got hit and saw stars.” Clark writes of the passage: “Plath’s colon suggests that she ‘got hit’ by the ricocheting glass, not by Hughes” - a conclusion contrary to the one many other readers have reached.

The ensuing altercation caused Plath to report in her journal that the fight left her with a strained thumb and Hughes with claw marks on his cheeks. In May 1958, when Plath was teaching at Smith, she saw Hughes strolling on campus with a student. Portions of “Red Comet” are deeply moving, but a tendency to downplay Hughes’s violence will likely attract critics.

Red comet sylvia plath review