Red Comet

Starred review from August 31, 2020
Clark (The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes) offers a page-turning, meticulously researched biography of Sylvia Plath. Informed by never-before-accessed documents, Clark builds a narrative that gathers full force starting with Plath’s ill-fated Mademoiselle internship at age 20, and continues through her career as an acclaimed poet, her marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes, and her suicide at age 30. Clarke highlights bestselling author Olive Higgins Prouty as a generous source of emotional and financial support throughout Plath’s life, while casting doubts on the helpfulness of Ruth Barnhouse, Plath’s close friend and her psychiatrist during the 1953 stay in a psychiatric ward that inspired her novel The Bell Jar. However, Clark places the greatest emphasis on the Hughes-Plath marriage, depicting it as a creatively charged and ultimately destructive partnership, in which Hughes’s moments of gentleness and supportiveness existed alongside rage and abuse. Finally, Clark provides a new and convincing theory that Plath’s suicide came about not impulsively, but in response to the possibility that she would again have to undergo the traumatic process of institutionalization. Clark’s in-depth scholarship and fine writing result in a superb work that will deliver fresh revelations to Plath’s many devoted fans.

October 15, 2020
Sylvia Plath is a writer who generates deep cultural ambivalence: readers recognize the genius of the writing while also letting the details of Plath's life overdetermine and discolor the work. In her exhaustive new biography, Clark starts from scratch in defining Plath, carefully separating the popular myth of an unstable and overdramatic prodigy from the real Sylvia: troubled, yes, but also joyful in her reading, ruthlessly self-critical, and blazingly ambitious. Clark had access to material never before incorporated into a Plath biography, including letters and psychiatric records. This material not only fleshes out Plath herself, it also refocuses characters from the Plath-Hughes mythos, in particular Sylvia's mother, whose own memoir provides counterpoint to the fictional mother in Sylvia's novel, The Bell Jar, which has come to (mis)represent Plath's young adulthood. This additional material also prompts fresh readings of the poems, which makes the late work especially moving. In her introduction, Maggie Nelson writes, To be called the Sylvia Plath of anything is a bad thing. Red Comet has the authority and insight to permanently correct that sentiment.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

Starred review from July 1, 2020
A sober and detailed critical biography of one of the 20th century's greatest and most misunderstood poets. 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. 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. "Plath took herself and her desires seriously in a world that often refused to do so," writes Clark. 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. 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. 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. 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. The author's attention to specifics serves her very well in the closing pages, as she tracks how Plath's depression, anxiety over her literary standing, despair over her failed marriage, and fear of institutionalization speeded her death even while those same forces inspired indelible, harrowing late poems like "Daddy," "Lady Lazarus," and "Edge." A major biography that redeems Plath from the condescension of easy interpretation.

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December 11, 2020

A former Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, Clark (The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes) draws on new material, including unpublished letters and manuscripts; court, police, and psychiatric records; and fresh interviews, to offer an accessible reading of Plath's life and work.

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