Exhaustively researched, often brilliant biography of Sylvia Plath

ALMOST six decades after her death, Sylvia Plath stands as the most consequential poet of her generation. As a feminine voice, she dominates the 20th century. At the time of Plath’s death at age 30, critic A Alvarez wrote: “The loss to literature is inestimable.” The years have proved him right.

Because of the importance of her work – her Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize and her novel, The Bell Jar, is a coming-of-age classic – and because of the sensational circumstances of her death, extraordinary attention has been paid to Plath in both the academic and mainstream press.

So many biographies have appeared that Janet Malcolm produced The Silent Woman (1994), a study of Plath biography, with writers like Bitter Fame author Anne Stevenson suffering Malcolm’s brutal treatment.

Now, into the breach, comes Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, an exhaustively researched, frequently brilliant masterwork that stretches to 1 072 pages (including notes). It is an impressive achievement representing a prize-worthy contribution to literary scholarship and biographical journalism.

Red Comet thoroughly chronicles all stages of Plath’s life. An idyllic childhood on the Massachusetts coast near Boston was shattered by the early death of her father, Otto Plath, a biologist who misdiagnosed himself with cancer only to die of – as Clark reports finding in the death certificate – “diabetes mellitus and bronchial pneumonia, due to gangrene in the left foot”.

Plath’s now-single mother, Aurelia, moved with the children, Sylvia and Warren, to Wellesley, Massachusetts, where Sylvia graduated from high school. Plath’s stellar academic career at Smith College, a school for women in Northampton, Massachusetts, was marred in the summer of 1953 by an unsettling guest editorship at Mademoiselle that led to a nervous breakdown and a suicide attempt.

“I swallowed quantities (of sleeping pills) and blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness,” Plath wrote to a friend.

These events inspired The Bell Jar.

Plath’s marriage to poet Ted Hughes, whom she met while on a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge University, England, produced two children (Frieda and Nicholas) and two historic bodies of work.

But the marriage’s end caused a searingly intense unhappiness that ultimately consumed them both.

The unravelling began in May 1962