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

Name: Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
Price: 16.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Heather Clark
ISBN: 9780307961167

This highly anticipated new biography of Sylvia Plath focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art. Author and historian Heather Clark explores Plath'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; her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, a marriage of true minds that would change the course of poetry in English; and much more.

Determined not to read Plath's work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark evokes a culture in transition, in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Holocaust. Her clear-eyed portraits of 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. With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials — including unpublished letters and manuscripts; court, police, and psychiatric records; and new interviews — along with illuminating readings of the poems themselves, Clark's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.