*WINNER OF THE SLIGHTLY FOXED PRIZE 2021* *A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH AND THE TIMES*ĭetermined not to read Plath's work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark presents new materials about Plath's scientist father, her juvenile writings, and her psychiatric treatment.

He has published several articles on Plath and is a co-editor of the two-volume The Letters of Sylvia Plath, and a co-author of These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia PlathĬlick here to register for the Live! event.The first biography of this great and tragic poet that takes advantage of a wealth of new material, this is an unusually balanced, comprehensive and definitive life of Sylvia Plath. Steinberg, author of the biography Sylvia Plath and the ‘Introduction’ to The Spoken Word: Sylvia Plath. Clark's 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first-rate poems.Ĭlark will be in conversation with Peter K. With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials-including unpublished letters and manuscripts court, police, and psychiatric records and new interviews- Heather Clark's Red Comet brings to life the brilliant Sylvia Plath who had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.ĭetermined 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, 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.

Sylvia plath heather clark