![]() ![]() But dismissing earlier biographers does a disservice to Plath and to biographers who have painstakingly amassed a record of Plath’s achievements and activities on which Clark’s biography builds (see her notes)-not to mention Plath’s own penchant for sensational revelations and melodramatic behavior in her accounts of Hughes beating her and her damning Assia Weevil as the femme fatale who broke up Plath’s marriage.īut Clark has a point: Biographers have perhaps taken too much to heart the Wordsworthian conceit that the child is father to the man-or in this case that the death of Plath’s powerful father, Otto, when she was only eight, led to her mythologizing of him in “Daddy,” a poem that deals with her struggle to overcome the patriarchal Superman. ![]() ![]() Heather Clark, Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Huddersfield, and author of The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (2011), announces in a prologue her intention to “debunk the sensational and melodramatic rhetoric that surrounds” Plath and “finally, to examine her life through her commitment not to death, but to art.” Certainly, the work of previous biographers can be mined for instances of purple prose that suggests a deterministic view of a suicidal Plath, who first tried to take her life in 1953 and then succeeded ten years later. ![]()
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