Punching towards the light
Sylvia Plath as a professional writer
Hello and welcome to Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. October 27th marks Sylvia Plath’s birthday; if she had lived, she would be 92. Last month Faber published The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath, edited by Peter K. Steinberg, a great scholarly achievement that took over 30 years to complete and demonstrates Plath’s remarkable range as a writer and impressive work ethic. Virginia Woolf’s biographer Hermione Lee wrote that: ‘Women writers whose lives involved abuse, mental illness, self-harm, suicide, have often been treated, biographically, as victims or psychological case-histories first and as professional writers second.’ This new collection of Plath’s complete prose shows that as well as being a poet, she was publishing fiction, journalism, essays and reviews since early childhood. My essay this week is about her life as a professional writer.
On February 10 1960 Sylvia Plath strode into a pub in Dean Street in London looking, she wrote, “resplendent” in her black wool maternity suit, cashmere coat and new calfskin gloves from Paris. She was meeting the Heinemann publisher James Michie, who presented her with a contract for The Colossus and Other Poems. (“She signed it on the glass-crowded bar-top,” her husband Ted Hughes boasted to his sister Olwyn.) In a letter to her mother in America, Plath described every detail of her outfit, the “notorious” Soho pub, and her signature on the contract of the distinguished publishers of D.H. Lawrence. It was her supreme moment of triumph. She had married a brilliant poet, she was soon to be a mother and had just signed a contract for her first book. She had become the “triple-threat woman” she had always intended to be.
Yet it is with a much bleaker February day, almost exactly three years later, that most of us associate the name of Sylvia Plath. Her death on 11 February 1963 did not merit any headlines at the time; gas poisoning was a common way for women to kill themselves in mid-century London. There was just one brief report, in the Saint Pancras Chronicle, of the “tragic” suicide of the “30-year-old authoress Mrs. Sylvia Plath Hughes, wife of one of Britain’s best known modern poets, Ted Hughes.”
Just a few days later, the terms of Plath’s posthumous fame were set when the Observer published an anguished essay by the influential literary critic Al Alvarez, with loaded phrases like “peculiar genius” and “possessed”. And so the Plath myth began, and for well over half a century she has been more famous for her death than for her life and work.
Now, at last, there is Red Comet, a major new biography that recognizes Sylvia Plath as one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets writing in the English language. It’s a superbly researched, fluent and assured book tracing Plath’s development as a writer in America and England in meticulous detail, and Heather Clark writes with a rare empathy and understanding of her subject.
This is the first biography to draw fully on Plath’s surviving correspondence published in the The Letters of Sylvia Plath (published in two volumes in 2017 and 2018 edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen Kukil). Clark examines the information that has come to light in fourteen newly discovered letters that Plath sent to her American psychiatrist and confidante, Dr Ruth Beuscher from 1960 to 1963. Red Comet also incorporates material from the Harriet Rosenstein archive at Emory University, which opened in 2020, and considers Plath’s creative artwork and collages in the context of her writing. At over 1,000 pages it’s a big book, but not a sentence feels too much.
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) James Joyce famously wrote, “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.” Plath, too, wanted to fly, and previous biographers including Ronald Hayman and Andrew Wilson have implied that from childhood she followed the trajectory of her tragic fate by daring to fly too close to the sun. “Sylvia was trapped in her own story,” Anne Stevenson writes in her hostile biography Bitter Fame (1989), “she was indeed cursed.” Even the endearing fact that Sylvia began, aged eight, to send out her work for publication in the children’s section of newspapers has been portrayed as evidence of her “pathological” obsession with fame. “Male ambition is rarely described in this way”, as Clark drily notes.