Of the many reasons to accept the offer to teach Sylvia Plath at the Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes Summer School at Lumb Bank in Heptonstall, Yorkshire, one of the perks of the offer was the midweek day off from teaching in which the group journeyed to Haworth to visit the Brontë Parsonage and make the walk to Top Withens, the house that is rumored to have inspired Emily Brontë's beautiful, haunting, and perfect novel Wuthering Heights , have a pint at the Black Bull and walk around the village. The program of teaching with Heather Clark at Lumb Bank was a good one. I had the morning class from 9:30 to 11 am. Heather taught after a 30 minutes break from 11:30 to 1. Then lunch, followed by a varying schedule in the afternoon that saw some visitors (Steve Ely, Pascale Petit, and Carrie Smith) and some downtime. My class was upstairs in the barn and we focused on Plath's novel The Bell Jar . I overprepared, in that I did not get to cover everything that I planned. And this included ...

Congratulations to Heather Clark are in order as her Pulitzer Prize Finalist biography Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath  was issued in paperback in the U.S. earlier this week.  If you somehow had the patience to wait 11 months from when the hardback was issued, you are saint-like. Red Comet was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography. The paperback edition is published by the Vintage Books imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. It comes in at 1,118 pages and the ISBN is 978-0-30-795126-7.  You can buy it on Amazon , or from the publisher directly , or from your local book store.  If you are in the New York City area, Heather will be doing a live, in-person event on 1 December 2021. Details here . Red Comet will be published in paperback in the U.K. on 3 February 2022 . All links accessed 16 September 2021.

The first half of 2021 is in the rear view mirror. Sylvia Plath featured in every day for me, and maybe for you. In April and May, in the US and in the UK, respectively, readers were treated to the publication of Three-Martini Afternoons: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton ( publisher's website ). A  new edition  of Plath's poems is in the works for a 2024(ish) publication with Faber and Faber in London. Heather Clark's massive, commendable Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath was shortlisted for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. This is a phenomenal accomplishment and recognition for Clark's tome ( publisher's website ). Congratulations, Heather. Red Comet is a remarkable achievement. Paulina Bren published a biography of The Barbizon Hotel ( publisher's website ). Plath features a little bit in it, I am told. On  14 June, Janet Malcolm , author of The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes , passed away. Here and there I was worki...

2020 started off with an absolute Sylvia Plath bang with the news that Emory University purchased the Harriet Rosenstein papers related to Sylvia Plath. A few of us knew about it in late 2019, but when the collection would open for research was unclear. Well, they were opened up first thing . I hired Emily Banks, a graduate student at Emory, to take photographs of the papers. Throughout January and into very early February, Emily sent me daily files and it was kind of a mad flurry new information. It resulted in a streak of blog posts that I hope conveyed what it was like for me to read the files and try to process all the information. The best way to see these posts would be to look at the January and, respectively, February blog archives.  There are other blog posts in there, too. For example, I was privileged to join Janet Badia, Heather Clark, and Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick in Seattle for an MLA conference panel on Plath studies and Assia Wevill. It was great fun, though o...

Here’s a thing about me: I’m a voracious reader, but very rarely have a physically based emotional response to something I’m reading. I don’t laugh out loud, I don’t cry, both of which I do when watching movies. It’s not that I don’t find things funny or sad when I read, but apparently I need more of a visual cue. So it’s telling that when I got to the end of Dr. Heather Clark’s new biography of Sylvia Plath, Red Comet , I cried. It’s not as if I didn’t know how the story ended. But the level of detail and analysis Clark brings to her study of Plath is so detailed, and her examination of those brutal last weeks so deeply explored, that it broke my heart. Clark has done some tremendously important and much-needed work with this biography. It would be remiss of me not to note the aid she received from Peter K. Steinberg and the work he did compiling Plath’s Letters . Clark clearly spent a great deal of time studying these source materials, as well as others that were not available ...

Heather Clark's  Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath is published officially in the US today by Knopf.  The ISBN is 978-0307961167. The cover price is $36.The book is an outstanding 1,152 pages, with a comprehensive index and exhaustive, not to be missed notes. The reviews have been appearing since the summer. Due to delays in printing because of the world situation, the publication was pushed back several times. But now the book is officially out and readers will now get up to date with the most current life details on Sylvia Plath.  Here is a list of reviews: Kirkus Review , 1 July 2020 Michelle Renee Kidwell, Medium , 25 July 2020 Publisher's Weekly , 14 August 2020 Anna Spydell, Book Page , October 2020 Hamilton Cain, Oprah Magazine , October 2020 Andrew Wilson, Evening Standard , 8 October 2020 Lyndon Gordon, Daily Telegraph , 10 October 2020 J.P. O'Malley, Irish Independent , 11 October 2020 Laura Freeman, The Times , 15 October 2020 Anna L...

Last night I was privileged to have a conversation with Heather Clark, author of the imminently published (in the US) Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath hosted by Washington D.C. independent bookstore Politics and Prose .  The event was recorded and broadcast live on YouTube and is available now for consumption . Hope that you enjoy the hour long program. I really lovely every moment of it. I did not have the chance (or concentration ability) to see the full list of attendees but thank you to all who attended, and, as well, to all who watch it now. Buy the book from Politics and Prose ! One of the topics we discussed was the Harriet Rosenstein archive which is held by Emory University. You may remember in January and February this blog featured a lot of posts about the recently opened collection. Between then and maybe the summer, sometime, Emory was digitizing the audio cassette tapes that came with it. Due to the times, with a lot of places being closed or...

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 Pl...

On Friday, 23 October 2020, at 8 PM, Heather Clark, author of the new biography Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath , and I will have a conversation about her book courtesy of Politics and Prose, a Washington, D.C. based independent bookstore.  The event is free, you just simply have to register .  All links accessed 28 September 2020.

On Thursday, 9 January 2020, I had the privilege to share the stage with a panel of Sylvia Plath scholars--Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick (organizer and presenter), Heather Clark (presenter), and Janet Badia (respondent)---at the MLA conference in Seattle. Our topic was "New Developments in Sylvia Plath Studies: Archives, Biography, and Feminism". The audience was small, but that did not have any bearing on our passion for our respective pieces. After my talk, entitled "The Indefatigable Sylvia Plath", Heather presented "P(l)athography: Sylvia Plath and Her Biographers" which provided an overview of the role Plath biographies have played in pathologizing their subject. This was followed by Julie's "'Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children': Sylvia Plath's Representations of Assia Wevill", an investigation on Wevill's role as a muse in Sylvia Plath's poetry. Janet responded with an eloquent summation of our talks asking...