The highly anticipated 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. “One of the most beautiful biographies I've ever read." -Glennon Doyle, author of #1 New York Times Bestseller, Untamed.Genre: Biographies & Memoirs,Books,Fiction & Literature,Literary Criticism,įinalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography.At the very least, this humanizing biography will discourage grisly Sylvia Plath jokes. While changing the popular perception of Sylvia Plath will take time, this book is a vital first step. As Clark shows, Plath’s life does not fit neatly into anti-Hughes, second-wave ideas about the poet, nor the lurid portrayal of a red-lipsticked blonde who maniacally pursued A’s and fame. The result of Clark’s admirable efforts is a nuanced and compelling 937 pages (plus 200 some pages of backmatter notes) that demonstrate how Plath has been unfairly reduced.
Comparing “Daddy” to “The Waste Land” and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Clark writes that Plath’s ambitious late poems voice “horror at how an entire male humanist tradition, epitomized by her German professor father, has failed.” In reading Plath’s “Daddy” and other poems of this period, Clark demonstrates how these works are neither a mere tantrum against her family nor a “game of one-upsmanship” with her unfaithful partner. The benefit of Clark’s restraint is especially evident in her analysis of the break-up of the Hughes-Plath marriage.
0 kommentar(er)
