| Contents |
Prologue -- The beekeeper's daughter : Prussia, Austria, America, 1850-1932 -- Do not mourn : Winthrop, 1932-1940 -- The shadow : Wellesley, 1940-1945 -- My thoughts to shining fame aspire : Wellesley, 1946-1947 -- The voice within : Wellesley, 1947-1948 -- Summer will not come again : Wellesley, 1948-1950 -- The white queen : Wellesley and Smith College, 1950-1951 -- Love is a parallax : Swampscott, Smith College, Cape Cod, 1951-1952 -- The ninth kingdom : Smith College, September 1952-May 1953 -- My mind will split open : Manhattan, June 1953 -- The hanging man : Wellesley, July-August 1953 -- Waking in the blue : McLean Hospital, September 1953-January 1954 -- The lady or the tiger : Smith College and Harvard summer school, January-August 1954 -- O Icarus : Smith College and Wellesley, September 1954-August 1955 -- Channel crossing : Cambridge University, September 1955-February 1956 -- Pursuit : Cambridge and Europe, February-June 1956 -- Like fury : Spain, Paris, Yorkshire, Cambridge, July-October 1956 -- Itched and kindled : Cambridge University, October 1956-June 1957 -- In Midas' country : Cape Cod and Smith College, June 1957-June 1958 -- Life studies : Northampton and Boston, June 1958-March 1959 -- The development of personality : Boston, America, Yaddo, April-December 1959 -- The dread of recognition : London, 1960 -- Nobody can tell what I lack : London, January-March 1961 -- The moment of the fulcrum : London, March-August 1961 -- The late, grim heart of autumn : Devon, September-December 1961 -- Mothers : Devon, January-May 1962 -- Error : Devon, May-June 1962 -- I feel all I feel : Devon and London, June-August 1962 -- But not the end : Devon and Ireland, August-September 1962 -- The problem of him : Devon and London, October 1962 -- Castles in air : Devon and London, October-November 1962 -- Yeats's house : London, December 1962-January 1963 -- What is the remedy? : London, January-February 1963 -- The dark ceiling : London, February 1963 -- Epilogue : Your wife is dead -- Postscript: A poet's epitaph. |
| Abstract |
"An engrossing new biography of Sylvia Plath focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual growth and achievement, restoring the vivid creative woman behind the longtime Plath myths perpetuated by a pathology-based approach to her life and art. With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials, Heather Clark here brings to life the brilliant daughter of Wellesley, MA who had poetic ambition from a very young age, and was an accomplished, published writer of poems and stories before she became the star English student at Smith College. Determined not to read Plath's work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark presents new materials about Plath's scientist father, her juvenile writings, and her psychiatric treatment, and evokes a culture in transition in the mid-twentieth century, in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, as she explores Sylvia'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 sympathy for 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"-- Provided by publisher. |
