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Heather Clark's Red Comet Biography of Sylvia Plath Published Today

Heather Clark's long-anticipated biography Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath is published as of today in the UK. Order from Amazon or support your local bookshops to get your copy.

The book is published by Jonathan Cape. It is a behemoth: 1,152 pages. The ISBN is 978-1787332539.

From Amazon.com's description:

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With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials--including unpublished letters and manuscripts; court, police, and psychiatric records; and new interviews--Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant daughter of Wellesley,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

Heather and I will be discussing Red Comet (and more?!) on Friday, 23 October 2020 at a virtual event hosted by Politics & Prose. Please join us if you can!


Red Comet
 will be published in the US on the 27th by Knopf. The ISBN is 978-0307961167. 

All links accessed: 20 September 2020.  

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