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

Author(s): Heather Clark

BIOGRAPHY

The highly anticipated new biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art. With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials--including unpublished letters and manuscripts; court, police, and psychiatric records; and new interviews. Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant daughter of Wellesley, Massachusetts. Sylvia Plath had poetic ambition from a very young age and was an accomplished, published writer of poems and stories even before she became a star English student at Smith College in the early 1950s. Determined not to read Plath's work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark here evokes a culture in transition, in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, as she 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. Clark's clear-eyed sympathy for Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and the 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. 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.

$65.00 AUD

Stock: 0


Add to Wishlist


Product Information

Finalist - Pulitzer Prize for Biography 2021

General Fields

  • : 9781787332539
  • : Penguin Random House
  • : Penguin Books Ltd
  • : 1.533
  • : November 2019
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Heather Clark
  • : Hardback
  • : 2008
  • : English
  • : 1168