PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • The highly anticipated 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. “One of the most beautiful biographies I've ever read." —Glennon Doyle, author of #1 New York Times Bestseller, Untamed With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials, Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant Sylvia Plath, who had precocious poetic ambition and was an accomplished published writer even before she became a star at Smith College. Refusing to read Plath’s work as if her every act was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark considers the sociopolitical context as she thoroughly explores Plath’s world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her troubles with an unenlightened mental health industry; her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes; and much more. Clark’s clear-eyed portraits of Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath’s suicide promote a deeper understanding of her final days. 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.

A unique and invaluable collection of the young Sylvia Plath’s drawings from important and formative years in her life: 1955-1957 Sylvia Plath: Drawings is a portfolio of pen-and-ink illustrations created during the transformative period spent at Cambridge University, when Plath met and secretly married poet Ted Hughes, and traveled with him to Paris and Spain on their honeymoon, years before she wrote her seminal work, The Bell Jar. Throughout her life, Sylvia Plath cited art as her deepest source of inspiration. This collection sheds light on these key years in her life, capturing her exquisite observations of the world around her. It includes Plath’s drawings from England, France, Spain, and New England, featuring such subjects as Parisian rooftops, trees, and churches, as well as a portrait Ted Hughes. Sylvia Plath: Drawings includes letters and diary entries that add depth and context to the great poet’s work, as well as an illuminating introduction by her daughter, Frieda Hughes.

Here is the first book to bring long-overdue attention to Sylvia Plath's surprisingly accomplished visual art and to place that art in relation to her literary career. Plath trained as a studio artist before her sophomore year at Smith and her work in tempera and watercolor paintings, pastels, ink, crayon and pencil drawings, and other media reveals a talent that both complements and illuminates her genius as a writer. Eye Rhymes brings together essays by six Plath scholars-including renowned authors Diane Middlebrook, Landgon Hammer and Christiana Britzolakis, book editors Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley, and Fan Jinghua-and contextualizes approximately sixty of Plath's visual works within her writing oeuvre, starting with juvenilia that reveal the extensive play between her two disciplines. Special attention is given to Plath's unpublished teen diaries and book reports containing drawings and early textual experiments, created years before her famous "I am I" diary notes of age seventeen, when critical examination of her writing usually begins. The book offers new critical approaches to the artist's multidimensional output, including writing that appropriates sophisticated visual and color effects years after painting and drawing became her hobby and writing her chosen profession. The essays gathered here also relate Plath's visual art interests to her early identity as a writer in Cambridge, her teen artwork and writing on war, mid-career "art poems" on the works of de Chirico, her representations of womanhood within mid-century commercial culture, and her visual aesthetics in poetry. Filled with stunning reproductions of her art and fresh readings of many of her most important poems, Eye Rhymes offers readers a new way of understanding the full range of Plath's creative expression.

Recounts the troubled life of the American poet and uses her unpublished letters and journals to depict the feelings that led her to suicide

On the fiftieth anniversary of her death, a startling new vision of Plath—the first to draw from the recently-opened Ted Hughes archive The life and work of Sylvia Plath has taken on the proportions of myth. Educated at Smith, she had an epically conflict-filled relationship with her mother, Aurelia. She then married the poet Ted Hughes and plunged into the sturm and drang of married life in the full glare of the world of English and American letters. Her poems were fought over, rejected, accepted and, ultimately, embraced by readers everywhere. Dead at thirty, she committed suicide by putting her head in an oven while her children slept. Her poetry collection titled Ariel became a modern classic. Her novel The Bell Jar has a fixed place on student reading lists. American Isis will be the first Plath bio benefitting from the new Ted Hughes archive at the British Library which includes forty one letters between Plath and Hughes as well as a host of unpublished papers. The Sylvia Plath Carl Rollyson brings to us in American Isis is no shrinking Violet overshadowed by Ted Hughes, she is a modern day Isis, a powerful force that embraced high and low culture to establish herself in the literary firmament.

Since her suicide at age thirty, Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) has been celebrated for her impeccable and ruthless poetry, which excels at describing the most extreme reaches of Plath's consciousness and passions. Her work includes the autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, and such collections as The Collosus, Ariel, and the Pulitzer Prize -- winning Collected Poems. Based on exclusive interviews and extensive archival research, Rough Magic probes the events of Plath's life -- including her turbulent marriage to the English poet Ted Hughes -- in a biography that stands alone in its compassionate view of this fiercely talented, deeply troubled artist.

Despite being widely studied on both undergraduate and postgraduate courses the writing of Sylvia Plath has been relatively neglected in relation to the attention given to her life and what drove her to suicide. Tracy Brain aims to remedy this by introducing completely new approaches to Plath's writing, taking the studies away from the familiar concentration to reveal that Plath as a writer was concerned with a much wider range of important cultural and political topics. Unlike most of the existing literary criticism it shifts the focus away from biographical readings and encompasses the full range of Plath's poetry, prose, journals and letters using a variety of critical methods.

A biography of the American poet Sylvia Plath which presents a different view of her life and death by shifting any blame away from Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, and suggesting the problems lay in her personality difficulties.

Sylvia Plath's famous collection, as she intended it. When Sylvia Plath died, she not only left behind a prolific life but also her unpublished literary masterpiece, Ariel. When her husband, Ted Hughes, first brought this collection to life, it garnered worldwide acclaim, though it wasn't the draft Sylvia had wanted her readers to see. This facsimile edition restores, for the first time, Plath's original manuscript -- including handwritten notes -- and her own selection and arrangement of poems. This edition also includes in facsimile the complete working drafts of her poem "Ariel," which provide a rare glimpse into the creative process of a beloved writer. This publication introduces a truer version of Plath's works, and will no doubt alter her legacy forever. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.