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

So. I read this book because, as a young brooding English Lit major who read The Bell Jar, I had a fascination with Sylvia Plath. I don’t expect you to want to read this biography of over 800 pages unless you can relate. In her Pulitzer Prize finalist, Heather Clark constructs a complex, meticulously-researched portrait of Plath as a brilliant artist, and provides the socio-political context for Plath’s life.

What made this book fascinating to me (and the reason I’ve included it here on the site) is that Plath dealt with the same issues explored in today’s divorce memoirs. She attempted to reconcile her life as an ambitious poet with her life as a wife and mother, experienced her husband’s betrayal, and arrived at the understanding that she had idolized him and lost herself in the marriage. She, however, was living in the 1950s, when a woman’s intellectual and sexual independence could be punished with institutionalization or electroshock therapy, both of which Plath endured. The next fact astounded me; I had never heard it before. Clark writes that Plath received electroshock treatment at Valley Head Hospital in Massachusetts, the same hospital where “President John F. Kennedy sent his wife, Jackie, for electroshock treatment after a particularly brutal fight about his infidelity.” I recommend this book if you’re into Plath’s work, interested in insight into her life beyond myth, and enjoy the study of socio-political history.

“Sylvia despised Dr. Thornton and dreaded the procedure, but she submitted to it because she had no choice, fearing that if she resisted her shock treatments she would be institutionalized; in 1953, this was a very real possibility. (Indeed, the number of American psychiatric inpatients peaked in 1953 at a little over 500,000.) She was at the mercy of a patriarchal medical system that assumed that highly ambitious, strong-willed women were neurotic. As women, she and her mother had no power to defy the system: the doctor knew best.”