I was familiar with Sylvia Plath because I read THE BELL JAR and later did a report on her for a woman's literature class where I was exposed to ARIEL and her poetry.
At first I was reluctant to order the book because it's almost a thousand pages long and it hadn't been that long wince I read THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT, equally daunting.
I was surprised I wasn't seeing a bio of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century on the best seller's lists. It may have something to do with Heather Clark's analysis of practically every poem Sylvia ever wrote, including the high school stuff. When she finally got to the good stuff, she would quote a few lines, which is an injustice to the poet in my view. The reader could use an appendix.
Sylvia was a driven person, but she had a rather split personality. She wanted to be a famous poet and novelist but she also wanted to be a wife and mother. She often referred to career women as barren in her poetry. Her fanatical drive got her in trouble early when she got an internship at MADEMOISELLE. Remarkably she was assigned to work with the managing editor. But she was disappointed in the magazine's main purpose, selling make-up and other gunk to women. When she returned home, she went into a funk and became so depressed she actually tried to commit suicide, which led to a stint in a sanatorium and, believe it or not, shock treatment. She had nightmares for years about that.
Sylvia was publishing poetry in high school (try that some time) mainly in the women's magazines, but once she got to Smith she got the occasional poem in POETRY magazine and even the ATLANTIC. The NEW YORKER was a lifelong goal which accomplished repeatedly just before she died.
Upon graduating from Smith she got a fellowship to Cambridge in England where she eventually met Ted Hughes, the great poet. He had no idea how to get a poem published until he met Sylvia. He was her dream man at first, and they were a team, reading and criticizing each other's work. They were married for six years; again Sylvia was her own worst enemy. She was jealous of every woman Ted met. When he brought home a sixteen year old girl whom he was mentoring, Sylvia wouldn't let her in the house. When Ted worked with an older woman at the BBC, she blew up. Heather Clark implies Ted wasn't cheating until after he left her.
By then they had two kids. She tried to get an au pair to help her with the kids so she could write in the mornings; that worked for a while, but she just couldn't stand to live without Ted no matter how much she denied it. She did establish a relationship with Al Alvarez, the leading literary critic in England, who loved her work. But England was even more sexist than America when it came to female poets. When Alvarez published his anthology of leading young poets, no women were in it. Sylvia and Anne Sexton made the second one. He thought she was better than Ted.
Sylvia is often viewed as a confessional poet, but she was a lot more than that. She bared her soul in her work. She wrote about depression, infidelity, motherhood, mother hatred and sex. Outrageously THE BELL JAR, a female CATCHER IN THE RYE wasn't published in America until 1971, eight years after she died. It was one of the best-selling books of the 20th century, and it's still selling.
Ted, Alvarez and others tried to diagnose why Sylvia committed suicide. Ted and his girlfriend Assia Wevill got most of the blame, but I think it was really deja vu all over again, to quote Yogi Berra. She thought that if she met her soul mate and got a book published her life would be great. Instead her husband left her and the book didn't sell until she was gone. She couldn't live with that.