Clark’s clear-eyed portraits of 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. Determined not to read Plath’s work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark evokes a culture in transition, in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, as she explores Plath’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. With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials–including unpublished letters and manuscripts court, police, and psychiatric records and new interviews–Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant daughter of Wellesley, Massachusetts who had poetic ambition from a very young age and was an accomplished, published writer of poems and stories even before she became a star English student at Smith College in the early 1950s. The highly anticipated new biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art. Louis Post Dispatch, Minneapolis Star Tribune, USA Today, AARP, The Christian Science Monitor, and Entertainment Weekly* * Named a Fall Book to Read by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Literary Hub, St. *Shortlisted for the LA Times Book Prize in Biography * Winner of the Slightly Foxed Prize for Best First Biography

* Best Book of 2020 by Oprah Magazine, Barnes & Noble, Lit Hub, The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly, Bookmarks, A Mighty Girl, The Times (London), The Times of India, The Daily Telegraph, Open Letters Review, and the Good Morning America Book Club*

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