February 11th, 2024 marks the 61st anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s suicide. This infamous date, that horrible morning, stands like a grim gravestone in the hallowed halls of 20th century poets and authors. Here lies a woman who didn’t make it.
I have often thought of Plath as a victim of her time, of her circumstances. A chronic overachiever, she was going to do it all. She was going to have the passionate literary marriage. She was going have many children who would play at her feet in a beautiful English garden while she wrote. She was going to do projects with the BBC and cook incredible meals and write poetry that set hearts on fire. She was going to make her mark as a brilliant academic and an inspiring teacher. There would be awards and prestige and above all, art.
I don’t think Plath was only motivated by renown, though it would be a lie to say she wasn’t incredibly ambitious. She was an ardent champion of his work, but she also bristled at the continued successes of her well-respected then-husband, Ted Hughes. At literary parties she was often greeted with a bemused and indulgent, “Oh, so you write too?”
Plath’s ambitions were often thwarted by the harsh practicalities and disappointments of her life: Hughes’ infamous infidelity, cold, bleak winters with no heating, little time to write, no childcare, sexism, and of course, her own ongoing struggle with mental illness.
She didn’t make it. And people are understandably drawn to this macabre fact - the gas oven and the kids in the next room, all in Yeats’ old flat. I have written before about all that Sylvia Plath has meant to me over the years and how I’m consistently trying to save her from cliche and voyeurism, trying to see her as a person - brilliant, but flawed.
Heather Clark’s biography, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, published in 2020, is the only Plath biography I’ve read to date that I think honors Plath fully as a poet and an artist, while also giving the important contextual details of her life. If you are looking to get to know Plath, I recommend starting here. It’s quite a tome (over a thousand pages, though a few hundred of those pages are footnotes), but worth the time to read.
This is a review I wrote a few years ago after I first read it. I hope this essay helps you get to know Plath a little bit better - to see her thoroughly unique talent, her joyful hopes, the complexity of her illness, the deep love for her children - in other words, I hope here you start to see a human being, and not a suicide.
According to my records, this is the 6th Sylvia Plath biography I've read. The details of her life were not a mystery to me when I opened this book, though I hadn't revisited them for many years. Plath became an interest - closer to obsession - of mine in High School, when I found her haunting poems and dark novel the stuff of every 16 year old girl's fulfilled imagination. My (now) husband and I would go on to write about her during a summer research project during college, as part of a thesis entitled - "Imaginary Conversions: Post-Holocaust Jewish Identity in Four Non-Jewish Confessional Poets" (quite a mouthful I see now). We were granted access to her archives at Smith College, a trip I'll never forget. We gleefully, secretly, lifted the plastic coverings, touched ever-so-slightly her letters, her poems. When in London we found the infamous Yeats flat, where Plath spent her last few months.
During those years I read many biographies - always disappointed. There was the bitter diatribe written by Anne Stevenson (and overseen - "almost as an act of co-authorship" Stevenson admitted - by Ted Hughes' sister, Olwyn, who had her own agenda when it came to Plath). There were the simplistic narratives of the more recent "American Isis" and "Mad Girl's Love Song." In these biographies the emphasis was either on Plath's madness or - ironically - on her normalcy, her "all-American" platinum summer and desire for domestic perfection. None seemed brave enough, or equipped enough, to grapple with the real depth, horror, and profundity of her poetry. And they almost always simplified the relationship with Hughes, the most important of her life - usually with Hughes coming out the unredeemed adulterer.
Plath's life was more complicated. Perhaps now, finally, with enough distance between history and myth-making, we can view her a little more clearly. Heather Clark's biography, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, has the unique advantage of full access to both the Hughes and Plath estates (a privilege not granted to earlier biographers) and the level of detail is astounding. Clark has written the first clear-eyed view of Plath in my estimation: as poet, mother, wife, and woman. She has astutely brought out the larger themes in Plath's work (often forgotten amidst the sensationalism of her life and death): among them, materialism, nuclear war, the tension between art and motherhood, and the mind-numbing capitalism of post 1950's industrial society. I especially appreciated the detailed and thorough attention to the poems themselves, which are granted pages of analysis and careful reading.
As for Plath's personal life, Clark offers a nuanced, fair-minded account. Hughes is neither savior nor villain. He is, undoubtedly, the love of Plath's life, an incredible influence on her art, and also the man who hurt her perhaps beyond repair. With full access to Hughes' estate we are also granted access to his personal journals and letters, showing a complicated, fraught relationship. Yet amidst so many conflicts, neither Plath nor Hughes ever doubted the other's talent and indeed were joint champions of each other's work, each owing an inestimable debt to the other in the development of their writing.
“And you will never know what a battle
I fought to keep the meaning of my words
Solid with the world we were making.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters
Clark also gives a steady-handed account of Plath's relationship with her mother Aurelia. Neither the bouncy, upbeat tone of "Letters Home" or the dark, destructive late-night thoughts of Plath's "Unabridged Journals" can give a full, accurate account of this complicated mother-daughter relationship. Undoubtedly, Path’s psychiatrist, Dr. Beuscher - a morally ambiguous influence in Plath's life - helped Plath, for better or worse, to see her relationship with her mother in Freudian terms and also gave her a convenient outlet for her rage and grief (perhaps never fully dealt with as a young child when she lost her father). Aurelia, for her part, seems somewhat bewildered in Clark's account - doing all she can for the daughter she adores but almost inevitably saying and doing exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time.
“If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.”-Sylvia Plath, The Rival
The account of Plath's last few months are startling and raw. Reading this biography it was perhaps the first time I truly felt the immense tragedy of her suicide. At a distance of literary admiration it is easy to simply shake our heads - 'what a shame.' But when you've invested in some 800+ pages at that point, getting to know a complicated, unique individual, her death truly seems such an avoidable loss. The mythology goes that Plath wrote in a frenzy - that those last poems of Ariel were written in the white-hot glare of suicidal intention - and perhaps would have been impossible to write without their creator's inevitable destruction. Clark casts doubt on this narrative. Up until the very week of her death Plath was making long-term plans. She was signing contracts with the BBC, planning vacations abroad with friends, looking into a new nanny for the children, and working heavily on a new novel. She had also signed a 5 year contract on the Yeats apartment, hoping to one day buy the entire building and rent out flats.
This does not sound like a woman in complete despair. Yet she was undoubtedly unstable. Her separation from Hughes had challenged all her assumptions about her own life - and about the man she thought she knew better than anyone in the world. Hughes, who had betrayed her with a woman she saw as 'barren, manipulative, evil,' had also betrayed their shared ideals of the sacrament of the artistic marriage. Only 2% of households in England in 1962 were headed by single mothers. Plath felt alienated, humiliated.
“Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.”
― Sylvia Plath, Years
Yet, per Clark's research, it really seems that it was the threat of institutionalization that made her feel she had no way out. Still suffering from PTSD after the mismanaged shock treatments Plath had received after her first suicide attempt in the 1950s, she had vowed to never trust herself to a psychiatric institution again. Her London doctor, a well-intentioned if perhaps ill-equipped, general practitioner had arranged for a bed for her at a well-respected institute. A nurse was to arrive that Monday morning to care for the children in Plath's absence. On a loaded cocktail of poorly interacting pills, Plath seemed to friends to be out-of-sorts, weepy, angry, unstable, invariably not herself. They tried to keep her from being home alone - indeed the night before she died she was accompanied by one friend or neighbor until about 12:30 AM, but eventually Plath absolutely insisted on time to do laundry for the children and get things ready for the nurse.
“I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?
I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches? -
Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.”― Sylvia Plath, Elm
So was it this fear of psychiatric institutionalization that drove Plath to her suicide? Perhaps. It also seems she was, in a strange way, protecting her children. Many of her drafts from the time include crossed out lines about taking the children 'with her.' Some have surmised this was the reason Hughes burned those last few journal entries - that Plath had, at one point or another, contemplated also killing her children when she killed herself. It seems quite obvious now that Plath was suffering from severe postpartum depression in addition to a host of other psychological ailments. The care with which she sealed off the children's room was never lost on those who found her on that cold morning. While many of Plath's poems express a desire for an escape from the 'drudgery' of motherhood, she also saw her children as the 'redemption' of her life. In her introduction to "Nick and the Candlestick" on the BBC she said:
"In this poem... a mother nurses her baby son by candlelight and finds in him a beauty which, while it may not ward off the world's ills, does redeem her share of it." In the poem, she tells her son he is "the one / solid the spaces lean on ... You are the baby in the barn."
For his part, Hughes would go on to write movingly of the surreal realities of raising their children in her absence.
“What can I tell you that you do not know
Of the life after death?
Your son’s eyes, which had unsettled us
With your Slavic Asiatic
Epicanthic fold, but would become
So perfectly your eyes,
Became wet jewels,
The hardest substance of the purest pain
As I fed him in his high white chair.
Great hands of grief were wringing and wringing
His wet cloth of face. They wrung out his tears.
But his mouth betrayed you — it accepted
The spoon in my disembodied hand
That reached through from the life that had survived you.
Day by day his sister grew
Paler with the wound
She could not see or touch or feel, as I dressed it
Each day with her blue Breton jacket.
By night I lay awake in my body
The Hanged Man
My neck-nerve uprooted and the tendon
Which fastened the base of my skull
To my left shoulder
Torn from its shoulder-root and cramped into knots —
I fancied the pain could be explained
If I were hanging in the spirit
From a hook under my neck-muscle.
Dropped from life
We three made a deep silence
In our separate cots.
We were comforted by wolves.
Under that February moon and the moon of March
The Zoo had come close.
And in spite of the city
Wolves consoled us. Two or three times each night
For minutes on end
They sang. They had found where we lay.
And the dingos, and the Brazilian-maned wolves —
All lifted their voices together
With the grey Northern pack.
The wolves lifted us in their long voices.
They wound us and enmeshed us
In their wailing for you, their mourning for us,
They wove us into their voices. We lay in your death,
In the fallen snow, under falling snow,
As my body sank into the folk-tale
Where the wolves are singing in the forest
For two babes, who have turned, in their sleep,
Into orphans
Beside the corpse of their mother.”
― Ted Hughes, Last Letter
This is a thorough, engaging, well-written, impeccably researched biography. It saves Sylvia Plath from the myth she so often becomes, while giving due respect to the profundity of her art. Finally, a biography worthy of its subject.
Hi, I’m Katie, a writer and podcaster and I believe that literature, art, beauty, theology, and wonder are worth our time and attention. This essay was free for you to read, but took time and research to write - consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support the work I do.
Visit www.bornofwonder.com and find Born of Wonder the podcast on podbean, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you download your podcasts.
Connect with me for audio support, podcast consultation, museum and memory making initiatives, soundscapes, or voiceovers by visiting www.mediamarqcreative.com
I’m co-leading a trip to Ireland in October 2024! Join us for an unforgettable trip!
Download the brochure / Commonly asked questions / Sign up!
Contact me anytime at: marquettekatie@gmail.com
Since we adopted a girl out of foster care I’ve seen how dysfunctional the mental health system is even now. The mind is such a hard thing to treat.
This is really beautiful. Maybe you should write a biography too, ha! You have made me want to read the one you mention. Your writing, intellect, and humanity all come across so beautifully in this piece.