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    Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

    £18.00
    £20.00
    Price-Match is available in-store for recommended titles in CCCU module handbooks
    ISBN: 9781529113143
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    Attribute nameAttribute value
    AuthorClark, Heather
    Pub Date03/02/2022
    BindingPaperback
    Pages992
    Publisher: CORNERSTONE, HUTCHINSON HEINEMANN (RHP GROUP)
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    The first biography of this great and tragic poet that takes advantage of a wealth of new material, this is an unusually balanced, comprehensive and definitive life of Sylvia Plath.

    *WINNER OF THE SLIGHTLY FOXED PRIZE 2021*
    *A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH AND THE TIMES*
    *FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE IN BIOGRAPHY 2021*

    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; and her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, a true marriage of minds that would change the course of poetry in English.

    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.