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

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

The 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. With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials -- including unpublished letters and manuscripts; court, police, and psychiatric records; and new interviews -- Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant daughter of Wellesley,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, who 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.

Intent on not reading 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, 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, leading to a marriage of true minds that would change the course of poetry in English; and much more. Clark's clear-eyed portraits of Hughes, his lover Assis Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath's suicide promote a deeper understanding of her final days, with their outpouring of revolutionary 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.

Alfred A. Knopf, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 2nd Printing, 2020