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4.64 AVERAGE
4.64 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
If you're looking for an informational book on the life of Sylvia Plath with no bias or agendas, then this is the book for you. The author presents both sides of the story with facts based on Sylvia's surviving journals, letters, family & friends recollections, etc. If you're a fan of "The Bell Jar," then you should definitely read this book as it explains everything pertaining to the book. The characters & events are based on Sylvia's actual experiences with her mother, family, friends, & her horrific experiences with ECT.
Heather Clark starts this story with Aurelia & Otto Plaths' origins. Then she goes into detail piece by piece, connecting every piece of media related to Sylvia as a child up to her eventual tragedy. You get to know about her love life, relationships with her family & friends, her experiences during this era of a literary male dominated society, & her state of mind as the years progress. Ted Hughes & Assia Wevills' relationship is also explained, & you get to read about the mental turmoil this had on Sylvia.
There is no taking sides in this biography. Heather Clark made sure to be articulate with her information & had everyone's voices heard pertaining to their experiences with Sylvia Plath. There is never a dull moment in this biography, & you get hooked reading about the genius of Sylvia Plath.
Review: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
In my experience reading this book, I felt like Sylvia & Ted Hughes were living in a tragic novel of their own. Emphasis of greek tragedy, gothic elements & symbolism dominate their lives & the book. Sylvia's battle with depression, her crippling fear of ECT & her obsession with the "double self/doppelganger"(Esther Greenwood/Ted Hughes/Jane Anderson/Assia Wevill/Aurelia Plath) dominate her personal life.
Sylvia & Ted both play off each other as a modern-day Catherine & Heathcliff based on one of my favorite novels, "Wuthering Heights." Both obsessed lovers who eventually destroy one another to a certain extent (Ted doing most of the damage). Ted lives in despair for his actions & in my opinion, he never recovers as Sylvia's shadow looms over him throughout the rest of his remaining life. (Deservedly)
Assia Wevill, you could feel sympathy for her. She didn't force Ted to leave Sylvia. That was Ted's choice. Just like Sylvia & Ted hold similar characteristics to characters in "Wuthering Heights", Assia & Ted felt like a retelling of Anna & Vronskys' relationship in "Anna Karenina" & how society openly accepted Ted's flaws while they condemned Assia for hers. (Assia was a married woman to David Wevill until her suicide.) Society at this time was very unforgiving to Sylvia as well. Sylvia was living alone with 2 children under constant condemnation while Ted was off having affairs with multiple women, eventually leading both women to their untimely demises.
I personally enjoyed reading Sylvias life day by day & seeing her progress throughout the years. Especially her relationship with Ted Hughes. In my opinion, Ted would not be the person he is today if Sylvia didn't push him to be his best. While Ted was living Sylvias' dreams, Sylvia was in the background trying to overcome his shadow. She knew Ted was destined for greatness & Sylvia was doing everything in her power to reach those same heights while at the same time she was helping Ted with editing & getting his work published in both England & America. She was also caring for 2 children while juggling time for her literary career. Meanwhile Ted was living a laissez-faire lifestyle (Ted never had a job, Sylvia was the "Man of the house" while maintaining the household.) It's a shame it took this tragedy to finally recognize the genius of Sylvia Plath since she was mostly a background character while Ted got live the life she wanted as the main character.
A cocktail of unfortunate events pile up that eventually leads to Sylvia's suicide. Such as Ted's multiple betrayals, lack of friends & family in England, isolated in England during poor winter weathers (poor infrastructure due to both World Wars has Sylvia living in archaic conditions with no heating systems that were popular in America), sexist society chastising her work & her personal life, undiagnosed PTSD/ potential Bipolar Disorder, inadequate psychiatric treatment, prescribed medications, rejections from major publishing companies, & her doctor forcing her to go into clinical care (Sylvia confided to a friend that she vowed to kill herself after her first attempt in her early 20s if she ever had to face ECT.) (The day she was to be taken into psychiatric care was the day she was found dead. It's also been theorized that Sylvia killed herself because she didn't want to burden her family anymore with medical costs & this being her 2nd breakdown, she didn't want to shame her family dealing with her mental illness again considering the stigma behind it at the time.
I only found out about Plath last year from a poem, & I looked her up & fell into a rabbit hole reading about her story & struggles with mental health. I definitely recommend this book to anyone willingly to put the time to learn about this talented & troubled genius & for anyone looking to thoroughly research "The Bell Jar."
Heather Clark starts this story with Aurelia & Otto Plaths' origins. Then she goes into detail piece by piece, connecting every piece of media related to Sylvia as a child up to her eventual tragedy. You get to know about her love life, relationships with her family & friends, her experiences during this era of a literary male dominated society, & her state of mind as the years progress. Ted Hughes & Assia Wevills' relationship is also explained, & you get to read about the mental turmoil this had on Sylvia.
There is no taking sides in this biography. Heather Clark made sure to be articulate with her information & had everyone's voices heard pertaining to their experiences with Sylvia Plath. There is never a dull moment in this biography, & you get hooked reading about the genius of Sylvia Plath.
Review: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
In my experience reading this book, I felt like Sylvia & Ted Hughes were living in a tragic novel of their own. Emphasis of greek tragedy, gothic elements & symbolism dominate their lives & the book. Sylvia's battle with depression, her crippling fear of ECT & her obsession with the "double self/doppelganger"(Esther Greenwood/Ted Hughes/Jane Anderson/Assia Wevill/Aurelia Plath) dominate her personal life.
Sylvia & Ted both play off each other as a modern-day Catherine & Heathcliff based on one of my favorite novels, "Wuthering Heights." Both obsessed lovers who eventually destroy one another to a certain extent (Ted doing most of the damage). Ted lives in despair for his actions & in my opinion, he never recovers as Sylvia's shadow looms over him throughout the rest of his remaining life. (Deservedly)
Assia Wevill, you could feel sympathy for her. She didn't force Ted to leave Sylvia. That was Ted's choice. Just like Sylvia & Ted hold similar characteristics to characters in "Wuthering Heights", Assia & Ted felt like a retelling of Anna & Vronskys' relationship in "Anna Karenina" & how society openly accepted Ted's flaws while they condemned Assia for hers. (Assia was a married woman to David Wevill until her suicide.) Society at this time was very unforgiving to Sylvia as well. Sylvia was living alone with 2 children under constant condemnation while Ted was off having affairs with multiple women, eventually leading both women to their untimely demises.
I personally enjoyed reading Sylvias life day by day & seeing her progress throughout the years. Especially her relationship with Ted Hughes. In my opinion, Ted would not be the person he is today if Sylvia didn't push him to be his best. While Ted was living Sylvias' dreams, Sylvia was in the background trying to overcome his shadow. She knew Ted was destined for greatness & Sylvia was doing everything in her power to reach those same heights while at the same time she was helping Ted with editing & getting his work published in both England & America. She was also caring for 2 children while juggling time for her literary career. Meanwhile Ted was living a laissez-faire lifestyle (Ted never had a job, Sylvia was the "Man of the house" while maintaining the household.) It's a shame it took this tragedy to finally recognize the genius of Sylvia Plath since she was mostly a background character while Ted got live the life she wanted as the main character.
A cocktail of unfortunate events pile up that eventually leads to Sylvia's suicide. Such as Ted's multiple betrayals, lack of friends & family in England, isolated in England during poor winter weathers (poor infrastructure due to both World Wars has Sylvia living in archaic conditions with no heating systems that were popular in America), sexist society chastising her work & her personal life, undiagnosed PTSD/ potential Bipolar Disorder, inadequate psychiatric treatment, prescribed medications, rejections from major publishing companies, & her doctor forcing her to go into clinical care (Sylvia confided to a friend that she vowed to kill herself after her first attempt in her early 20s if she ever had to face ECT.) (The day she was to be taken into psychiatric care was the day she was found dead. It's also been theorized that Sylvia killed herself because she didn't want to burden her family anymore with medical costs & this being her 2nd breakdown, she didn't want to shame her family dealing with her mental illness again considering the stigma behind it at the time.
I only found out about Plath last year from a poem, & I looked her up & fell into a rabbit hole reading about her story & struggles with mental health. I definitely recommend this book to anyone willingly to put the time to learn about this talented & troubled genius & for anyone looking to thoroughly research "The Bell Jar."
“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.”
Too meticulous.... I didn't need this much information.
dark
informative
reflective
slow-paced
This one is quite the undertaking, and I want to make sure I have a print copy as well as the audiobook.
'Sylvia Plath did not think of herself as a depressive. She considered herself strong, passionate, intelligent, determined, and brave, like a character in a D. H. Lawrence novel. She was tough-minded and filled her journal with exhortations to work harder—evidence, others have said, of her pathological, neurotic perfectionism. Another interpretation is that she was—like many male writers—simply ambitious, eager to make her mark on the world. She knew that depression was her greatest adversary, the one thing that could hold her back.'
This is easily in the top three best biographies that I have ever read, probably gaining the number one spot. Heather Clark is a Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Huddersfield, and that position alongside her eight year commitment gives this book a specialness. After watching her YouTube interview with Ruth Franklin, where she discussed her reasons for writing such a sizeable biography on this confessional poet, I knew that I had to buy it. A congrats also to Clark for being nominated as a Pulitzer finalist!
This biography charts the short life of Sylvia Plath from her childhood in 1932 up until her suicide in W.B. Yeats's former home in 23 Fitzroy Road, London in 1963. Clark wants to erase the caricature that the public has rendered of Plath. The words that we might associate with her are either heavy reductions or provably false. Biographies and presentations of her act like a game of Cluedo, where we are foretold the end of the game and all our preconceptions colour how we view the perpetrator. Put differently, many of the previous Plath biographies work backward from her suicide and then organise each of the events of her life as some fated precursor to that denouement. Clark avoids this. Clark instead focuses on her 'literary and intellectual development rather than her undoing.' Also separating this biography from others like it is its distinction of being the only one to utilise all her surviving letters - some of which are newly discovered and sent to her psychiatrist, Dr Ruth Beuscher, in the last few years of her life. Clark also weaves in her calendars and unpublished diaries.
The biography is split into three parts:
Part 1 begins way back in 1850, and outlines the lives of Sylvia's parents, Otto and Aurelia. It proceeds with Sylvia's childhood from 1932 up until her final years as an undergraduate at Smith College in 1955.
Part 2 is our introduction to the looming figure of Ted Hughes, who she meets at Cambridge University, where she was on a Fulbright Scholarship at Newnham College. It ends with her and Ted's stay at the Yaddo retreat.
Part 3 traces the last years of her life during 1960-1963. We are introduced to the influential Observer critic Al Alvarez who would champion Plath's poetry, to 'the most beautiful woman in London', Assia Wevill, to the conditions surrounding the publication of 'The Bell Jar' and 'Ariel', and to the causes which would lead to Sylvia's suicide.
The first part opens with the background of her brilliant father, Otto, and her mother, Aurelia. It later becomes evident why it is so critical that Clark began with their biographies. Otto, who died a week and a half after Plath's eighth birthday would be famously (mis)represented in her poem, 'Daddy' as a fascist and Nazi. Clark refutes this characterisation. In fact, Otto was opposed to Hitler and throughout comes across a lot better than Plath portrays in her writing. Like Sylvia, he displayed a 'rarefied intelligence', perhaps contributing to her intellectual inheritance of a 160 IQ. He would become an entomologist, and published in 1934, the acclaimed text 'Bumblebees and Their Ways.' Although Otto is more strikingly retained in the public's imagination by that poem, it is Aurelia who leaves the larger impact on Sylvia. In her adult life, it would be Ted Hughes and Aurelia who are her constant footholds (To a lesser extent, her benefactor Mrs Olive Prouty and her psychiatrist Dr Ruth Beuscher would also hold some prominence). In her childhood, Aurelia 'shared a bedroom with [Sylvia] for most of her late childhood and adolescence.' It would be Aurelia, who had pursued a Masters degree in English and German at Boston University, who constructed the conditions that would encourage Sylvia to transform into the poet that she would later become. Sylvia's influences would change over her life, but included W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, D.H. Lawrence, and her contemporaries Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell. Continually through this biography, I felt a deep sympathy for Aurelia. Firstly, she is tainted in the public's mind by 'The Bell Jar' as the protagonist Esther Greenwood's cold-hearted mother, which would prove to be 'a source of unending grievance to [her].' Secondly, Aurelia at heart, has the best interests for her daughter and does everything she can to support Sylvia even when she is an ocean away. The only major exception to this was during Sylvia's first stay in McLean, but it wasn't a lone misjudgement.
The lead up to Sylvia's first stay in McLean requires particular mention. Clark's chapter 'The Hanging Man, July-August 1953' left me welling up in bed at 23:15, wavering between sadness and indignation. This is the chapter of Sylvia's first suicide attempt, where she tries to kill herself by taking fifty sleeping pills and hiding under her home. This happens while her brother, Warren, is at work, Aurelia is out but her grandmother and grandfather are inside. Clark expertly weaves together what leads to her suicide attempt: her struggling with her James Joyce dissertation for Smith, the absolute mess of psychiatric care (where 85% of clinical psychologists were men resulting in often sexist diagnoses), the state of electroshock treatment at that time, the unyielding state of Sylvia's depression and other factors. A method of Clark's throughout this book is unpacking larger societal issues which impacted Sylvia. The aftermath of Plath's suicide attempt was also incredibly interesting. Her professors and other students knew about it. There was even a neighbourhood search for her, and she was featured in some local newspapers, with one's heading, the 'Beautiful Smith Girl Missing at Wellesley.' In her later applications for a Fulbright scholarship, the recommendation letters from her professors did not mention the incident. This owed to her brilliance, but it did feel that many in the creative communities of the 50s knew someone who had checked in to McLean or who had tried to take their own life. The poet, Anne Sexton, who influenced the poems in 'Ariel' also had suicidal tendencies. Robert Lowell, in whose 1959 creative writing seminar Sexton and Plath met, had also checked into McLean several times. Plath's six month stay there is less rare in this context.
Unlike the wholesome love story of John and Abigail Adam's marriage in David McCullough's biography, Plath's relationship with Ted Hughes was an enfolding of complexity. To Sylvia, it was as if he had the unique offerings of a fictional character, inimitable by any other man. In fact, in the beginning of their relationship, she would joke that she was Cathy and he was Heathcliff. Sylvia became aware of Ted through his poetry in college publications. Like Sylvia, he too had to win acclamation to pay his way into college (Unlike her, he hadn't yet sent the quantity of poems and short stories into magazines like 'Seventeen' and 'Mademoiselle') Their first meeting at a dance in Cambridge is fiery, almost Dionysian. Ted, who had a girlfriend at the party, is bitten by Plath on the cheek (!). Ted would memorialise this meeting in 'St Botolph's' in his 1998 collection 'Birthday Letters'. It is moments like this that recur throughout the biography where you see how alive Sylvia was. She was confident, funny, incredibly intelligent and brimmed with an enthusiasm for her life that tears apart our unsound characterisation of her.
The rest of the book binds Ted and Sylvia together. Even after cheating on her with Assia Wevill and initiating a divorce, they had built an uncommonly close connection. Plath ensured that Hughes received the acclaim that she felt he deserved, and he would help her develop her poetic voice which eventually led to 'Ariel'.
The lead-up to Plath's suicide happened over 1962 and 1963. In the midst of their divorce, she would, under the name Victoria Lucas, publish 'The Bell Jar'. It was met with good reviews, but it would not become a best-seller. Having to care for two children alone, she had been wagering that the financial uplift that she needed would come from that book's sales. Although Ted did pay a sum each month, it fell short of the amount that she needed to forge the literary life of a single mother. Her collection of 'The Collosus' would not do well in America, and the famed publisher Knopf would pass on an American print of 'The Bell Jar'. She could not alleviate the hurt from the indiscretions of Ted by finding another man, as 'she could never revenge herself by having affairs with other men, for none possessed Ted’s genius and beauty.' That winter, she was raising her two children in a London apartment that was also the coldest winter of the twentieth century in the capital. That cold debilitated her mental health, and winter tended to adversely affect Sylvia. Another factor which might have contributed to her suicide is Ted (possibly) telling her that she should kill herself. He also released a radio play, 'Difficulties of a Bridegroom', where he transformed Assia and Sylvia into symbols that would be rebroadcast two days before her suicide. Daniel Huws thought that this play 'had been the final humiliation that had pushed Sylvia to suicide.' I think this could have been a factor but Clark presents a more holistic argument. Her reasons for Sylvia's suicide included: the threat of being checked into an asylum (she may have had PTSD from her stay at McLean to the threat of electroshock therapy), her perceived lack of success for 'The Bell Jar' and 'The Colossus', her divorce and making it as a single mother, and bad combinations of her medication for her treatment of depression.
As a brief last comment, the aftermath of Sylvia's suicide shows us that a person never dies alone. The pain and guilt that those who knew her felt show us that the decision to take our own lives will not end with us. That pain is transmuted and I felt such hurt for Aurelia, Ted, Mrs Prouty and all those who were close to Sylvia, whose lives would be irrevocably marked by losing her.
Overall, this is a nuanced, near-perfect biography of Sylvia Plath. Clark is careful to not exalt her subject, and shows Sylvia's shortcomings. Sylvia sometimes offered a lack of empathy for her mother and Mrs Prouty, and she could cruelly characterise others in her poems or stories. As a further example of this balancing, Clark argues that some of her judgements on Assia's abortions 'complicate Plath’s status as a feminist icon.' Despite this, I mainly emerged from this biography seeing how vivacious a person Sylvia was, how ambitious, and I'm indebted to being able to glimpse how much writing can play a part in someone's life. I was left to query, if Sylvia had been sectioned in 1963, would she have lived as long as Hughes? Would we have had another collection like 'Ariel' or would she have finished another of her planned novels? I'm uncertain, but I'm so grateful that she, in a way, continues to live through her journals, letters and published work. As Clark captures, I would guess that Sylvia lived more vibrantly in 30 years than most of us will ever live in double that period. Highly recommended.
This is easily in the top three best biographies that I have ever read, probably gaining the number one spot. Heather Clark is a Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Huddersfield, and that position alongside her eight year commitment gives this book a specialness. After watching her YouTube interview with Ruth Franklin, where she discussed her reasons for writing such a sizeable biography on this confessional poet, I knew that I had to buy it. A congrats also to Clark for being nominated as a Pulitzer finalist!
This biography charts the short life of Sylvia Plath from her childhood in 1932 up until her suicide in W.B. Yeats's former home in 23 Fitzroy Road, London in 1963. Clark wants to erase the caricature that the public has rendered of Plath. The words that we might associate with her are either heavy reductions or provably false. Biographies and presentations of her act like a game of Cluedo, where we are foretold the end of the game and all our preconceptions colour how we view the perpetrator. Put differently, many of the previous Plath biographies work backward from her suicide and then organise each of the events of her life as some fated precursor to that denouement. Clark avoids this. Clark instead focuses on her 'literary and intellectual development rather than her undoing.' Also separating this biography from others like it is its distinction of being the only one to utilise all her surviving letters - some of which are newly discovered and sent to her psychiatrist, Dr Ruth Beuscher, in the last few years of her life. Clark also weaves in her calendars and unpublished diaries.
The biography is split into three parts:
Part 1 begins way back in 1850, and outlines the lives of Sylvia's parents, Otto and Aurelia. It proceeds with Sylvia's childhood from 1932 up until her final years as an undergraduate at Smith College in 1955.
Part 2 is our introduction to the looming figure of Ted Hughes, who she meets at Cambridge University, where she was on a Fulbright Scholarship at Newnham College. It ends with her and Ted's stay at the Yaddo retreat.
Part 3 traces the last years of her life during 1960-1963. We are introduced to the influential Observer critic Al Alvarez who would champion Plath's poetry, to 'the most beautiful woman in London', Assia Wevill, to the conditions surrounding the publication of 'The Bell Jar' and 'Ariel', and to the causes which would lead to Sylvia's suicide.
The first part opens with the background of her brilliant father, Otto, and her mother, Aurelia. It later becomes evident why it is so critical that Clark began with their biographies. Otto, who died a week and a half after Plath's eighth birthday would be famously (mis)represented in her poem, 'Daddy' as a fascist and Nazi. Clark refutes this characterisation. In fact, Otto was opposed to Hitler and throughout comes across a lot better than Plath portrays in her writing. Like Sylvia, he displayed a 'rarefied intelligence', perhaps contributing to her intellectual inheritance of a 160 IQ. He would become an entomologist, and published in 1934, the acclaimed text 'Bumblebees and Their Ways.' Although Otto is more strikingly retained in the public's imagination by that poem, it is Aurelia who leaves the larger impact on Sylvia. In her adult life, it would be Ted Hughes and Aurelia who are her constant footholds (To a lesser extent, her benefactor Mrs Olive Prouty and her psychiatrist Dr Ruth Beuscher would also hold some prominence). In her childhood, Aurelia 'shared a bedroom with [Sylvia] for most of her late childhood and adolescence.' It would be Aurelia, who had pursued a Masters degree in English and German at Boston University, who constructed the conditions that would encourage Sylvia to transform into the poet that she would later become. Sylvia's influences would change over her life, but included W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, D.H. Lawrence, and her contemporaries Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell. Continually through this biography, I felt a deep sympathy for Aurelia. Firstly, she is tainted in the public's mind by 'The Bell Jar' as the protagonist Esther Greenwood's cold-hearted mother, which would prove to be 'a source of unending grievance to [her].' Secondly, Aurelia at heart, has the best interests for her daughter and does everything she can to support Sylvia even when she is an ocean away. The only major exception to this was during Sylvia's first stay in McLean, but it wasn't a lone misjudgement.
The lead up to Sylvia's first stay in McLean requires particular mention. Clark's chapter 'The Hanging Man, July-August 1953' left me welling up in bed at 23:15, wavering between sadness and indignation. This is the chapter of Sylvia's first suicide attempt, where she tries to kill herself by taking fifty sleeping pills and hiding under her home. This happens while her brother, Warren, is at work, Aurelia is out but her grandmother and grandfather are inside. Clark expertly weaves together what leads to her suicide attempt: her struggling with her James Joyce dissertation for Smith, the absolute mess of psychiatric care (where 85% of clinical psychologists were men resulting in often sexist diagnoses), the state of electroshock treatment at that time, the unyielding state of Sylvia's depression and other factors. A method of Clark's throughout this book is unpacking larger societal issues which impacted Sylvia. The aftermath of Plath's suicide attempt was also incredibly interesting. Her professors and other students knew about it. There was even a neighbourhood search for her, and she was featured in some local newspapers, with one's heading, the 'Beautiful Smith Girl Missing at Wellesley.' In her later applications for a Fulbright scholarship, the recommendation letters from her professors did not mention the incident. This owed to her brilliance, but it did feel that many in the creative communities of the 50s knew someone who had checked in to McLean or who had tried to take their own life. The poet, Anne Sexton, who influenced the poems in 'Ariel' also had suicidal tendencies. Robert Lowell, in whose 1959 creative writing seminar Sexton and Plath met, had also checked into McLean several times. Plath's six month stay there is less rare in this context.
Unlike the wholesome love story of John and Abigail Adam's marriage in David McCullough's biography, Plath's relationship with Ted Hughes was an enfolding of complexity. To Sylvia, it was as if he had the unique offerings of a fictional character, inimitable by any other man. In fact, in the beginning of their relationship, she would joke that she was Cathy and he was Heathcliff. Sylvia became aware of Ted through his poetry in college publications. Like Sylvia, he too had to win acclamation to pay his way into college (Unlike her, he hadn't yet sent the quantity of poems and short stories into magazines like 'Seventeen' and 'Mademoiselle') Their first meeting at a dance in Cambridge is fiery, almost Dionysian. Ted, who had a girlfriend at the party, is bitten by Plath on the cheek (!). Ted would memorialise this meeting in 'St Botolph's' in his 1998 collection 'Birthday Letters'. It is moments like this that recur throughout the biography where you see how alive Sylvia was. She was confident, funny, incredibly intelligent and brimmed with an enthusiasm for her life that tears apart our unsound characterisation of her.
The rest of the book binds Ted and Sylvia together. Even after cheating on her with Assia Wevill and initiating a divorce, they had built an uncommonly close connection. Plath ensured that Hughes received the acclaim that she felt he deserved, and he would help her develop her poetic voice which eventually led to 'Ariel'.
The lead-up to Plath's suicide happened over 1962 and 1963. In the midst of their divorce, she would, under the name Victoria Lucas, publish 'The Bell Jar'. It was met with good reviews, but it would not become a best-seller. Having to care for two children alone, she had been wagering that the financial uplift that she needed would come from that book's sales. Although Ted did pay a sum each month, it fell short of the amount that she needed to forge the literary life of a single mother. Her collection of 'The Collosus' would not do well in America, and the famed publisher Knopf would pass on an American print of 'The Bell Jar'. She could not alleviate the hurt from the indiscretions of Ted by finding another man, as 'she could never revenge herself by having affairs with other men, for none possessed Ted’s genius and beauty.' That winter, she was raising her two children in a London apartment that was also the coldest winter of the twentieth century in the capital. That cold debilitated her mental health, and winter tended to adversely affect Sylvia. Another factor which might have contributed to her suicide is Ted (possibly) telling her that she should kill herself. He also released a radio play, 'Difficulties of a Bridegroom', where he transformed Assia and Sylvia into symbols that would be rebroadcast two days before her suicide. Daniel Huws thought that this play 'had been the final humiliation that had pushed Sylvia to suicide.' I think this could have been a factor but Clark presents a more holistic argument. Her reasons for Sylvia's suicide included: the threat of being checked into an asylum (she may have had PTSD from her stay at McLean to the threat of electroshock therapy), her perceived lack of success for 'The Bell Jar' and 'The Colossus', her divorce and making it as a single mother, and bad combinations of her medication for her treatment of depression.
As a brief last comment, the aftermath of Sylvia's suicide shows us that a person never dies alone. The pain and guilt that those who knew her felt show us that the decision to take our own lives will not end with us. That pain is transmuted and I felt such hurt for Aurelia, Ted, Mrs Prouty and all those who were close to Sylvia, whose lives would be irrevocably marked by losing her.
Overall, this is a nuanced, near-perfect biography of Sylvia Plath. Clark is careful to not exalt her subject, and shows Sylvia's shortcomings. Sylvia sometimes offered a lack of empathy for her mother and Mrs Prouty, and she could cruelly characterise others in her poems or stories. As a further example of this balancing, Clark argues that some of her judgements on Assia's abortions 'complicate Plath’s status as a feminist icon.' Despite this, I mainly emerged from this biography seeing how vivacious a person Sylvia was, how ambitious, and I'm indebted to being able to glimpse how much writing can play a part in someone's life. I was left to query, if Sylvia had been sectioned in 1963, would she have lived as long as Hughes? Would we have had another collection like 'Ariel' or would she have finished another of her planned novels? I'm uncertain, but I'm so grateful that she, in a way, continues to live through her journals, letters and published work. As Clark captures, I would guess that Sylvia lived more vibrantly in 30 years than most of us will ever live in double that period. Highly recommended.
dark
informative
sad
slow-paced