Plath’s painful and ultimately fatal perfectionism may have been smiled at by a proud Aurelia, but Clark makes it clear that neither parent caused it. Her mother, Aurelia, often portrayed as an overambitious literary harpy, is here more often shown to be hardworking, self-sacrificing, and intermittently tormented by Plath’s increasingly extreme moods as she grew into womanhood. Though Plath adored him as a young child, he died a slow, grim, silent death from untreated diabetes when she was 8 she later cast him as a Nazi villain in some of her most famous poems (including “Daddy”). Otto, Plath’s father, is depicted as mild and professorial (an entomologist, he studied the lives of honeybees), but preoccupied, aloof. The ghastliness of Plath’s death, suggests professor and scholar Heather Clark in her meticulous, magisterial, and surprisingly engrossing new biography, Red Comet, has prompted too many critics to regard Plath as “cultural shorthand for female hysteria” and her poems as evidence of psychological or feminist pathology.Ĭlark - drawing upon previously untapped court and family papers, diaries, calendars, and caches of letters (including to the poet’s psychiatrist in Plath’s final months), as well as the long-restricted archives of Hughes - sets out to reimagine and reposition Plath as a first-class poet and a fully realized woman: gifted from childhood, both intensely industrious and passionately sensual, bravely ambitious in an era that undercut and ridiculed girls’ and women’s aspirations, disciplined, trailblazing, and the author of a few of the most enduring and original poems of the last century.ĭeploying a series of new facts and deft character studies, Clark constructs a more nuanced view of Plath’s early life - her Germanic ancestry, the problematic marriage of her recent-immigrant parents, and her upwardly mobile childhood in idyllic Winthrop and then Wellesley, Massachusetts - than did earlier biographers.
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