American Isis
The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
On the fiftieth anniversary of her death, a startling new vision of Plath—the first to draw from the recently-opened Ted Hughes archive
The life and work of Sylvia Plath has taken on the proportions of myth. Educated at Smith, she had an epically conflict-filled relationship with her mother, Aurelia. She then married the poet Ted Hughes and plunged into the sturm and drang of married life in the full glare of the world of English and American letters. Her poems were fought over, rejected, accepted and, ultimately, embraced by readers everywhere. Dead at thirty, she committed suicide by putting her head in an oven while her children slept.
Her poetry collection titled Ariel became a modern classic. Her novel The Bell Jar has a fixed place on student reading lists. American Isis will be the first Plath bio benefitting from the new Ted Hughes archive at the British Library which includes forty one letters between Plath and Hughes as well as a host of unpublished papers. The Sylvia Plath Carl Rollyson brings to us in American Isis is no shrinking Violet overshadowed by Ted Hughes, she is a modern day Isis, a powerful force that embraced high and low culture to establish herself in the literary firmament.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The brief life of poet Sylvia Plath (1932 1963) has made for titillating reading before, with much having been written on the death of her father, her lovers, her tempestuous marriage to poet Ted Hughes (1930 1998) and her eventual suicide. But Rollyson claims the time has come to redefine the "Plath myth" and recognize how she was shaped by her need for attention and admiration. To this end, Rollyson gives relatively little time to Plath's own work. The poems are rarely referred to, whereas books she read and her correspondence are pushed up into view. The figure that emerges from Rollyson's study is certainly compelling, and very much a woman of her moment and culture, and Rollyson has a keen eye for the contradictions that make up a life. However, he also may be conflating his past subjects excessively, with strangely frequent and superfluous references to Marilyn Monroe. The book frequently suffers from an absence of sustained argument or momentum, and the time lines at the start of each chapter don't make up for this lack. However, in the book's final chapter, discussing the traditions and events in Plath studies since the poet's suicide, Rollyson's research and engagement are apparent in ways that might have helped the rest of the book.
