Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

by Emily Van Duyne

A nuanced, intelligent, and passionate exploration of the life and work of one of the most misunderstood writers of the twentieth century. Sylvia Plath is an object of enduring cultural fascination―the troubled patron saint of confessional poetry; a writer whose genius is buried under the weight of her status as the quintessential literary sad girl. A pro-Plath polemic, Loving Sylvia Plath examines these myths in order to dismantle them and asks why, when Plath speaks frankly about her husband’s brutality, we refuse to take her at her word. Emily Van Duyne―a superfan and scholar―radically reimagines the last years of Plath’s life, confronts her suicide and the construction of her legacy, and offers feminist, interdisciplinary readings of her extraordinary poetry. Drawing from decades of study on Plath and her husband Ted Hughes, the chief architect of Plath’s mythology; never-before-seen archival materials; and a nuanced, empathetic understanding of the experience of domestic violence; Van Duyne seeks to undo the silencing of Sylvia Plath and resuscitate her as the hard-working, brilliant writer she was. 6 illustrations

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Poetry, Essays, Biography Memoir, Feminism, History

320 pages, Hardcover

First published July 9, 2024

Reviews

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Plath wrote 'Tulips' soon after she miscarried her second pregnancy, a loss she later attributed to being beaten by Ted Hughes.

It was only possible to be shocked by Plath's accusations of abuse if you had ignored or disbelieved her - or, importantly, people writing about her - for the last fifty-one years. This was an old story.

... we don't read Falcon Yard as one of Plath's attempts to find language for a pattern of violence, including sexual violence, within a romantic relationship. Instead, this violence is presented as a symbol of Hughes' emotional impact on her psyche, rather than a literal mark on her body.

This is a definitively late engagement with Plath which re-opens the topic of her marriage to Ted Hughes with a specific focus on violence, sometimes sexualised, and the imbalances that have persisted in the way Plath is read, interpreted and represented, especially given the gaps in the archive, some of which can themselves be attributed to Hughes' attempts to control the narrative: 'Over the course of thirty-five years, Hughes admitted anecdotally and in print to either actively burning or losing Plath's journals, poems, letters, and her third novel-in-progress'.

Van Duyne isn't attempting to prise open the life as we know it though she does comment on the various biographies, including the early aborted attempts, and their stances including what was written out. It's surprising to see the claim that Heather Clark in Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, for instance, doesn't mention the claimed violence that possibly led to Plath's miscarriage, even though it is stated in letters. [Update: see comment below stating that this event is in Clark].

In some ways, then, this operates as a kind of meta-commentary somewhat like Janet Malcolm's The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes only here Van Duyne tries to contextualise her reading via some modern feminist theory on intimate partner violence (IPV). The theory is lightly used and can feel a bit defensive: Van Duyne was warned that nay-sayers would be coming for this book ('more Plath? why?') and her attempt to fight her corner by quoting from adjacent works such as The Haunting of Hill House (for female suicide) and In the Dream House for intimate partner violence doesn't necessarily shore up her project.

Nevertheless, this is helpful on re-examining Plath's marriage in the light of the Assia Wevill relationship with Hughes (she also committed suicide by gas and went one step further in taking her daughter by Hughes with her), and his later marriage as well as the many, many affairs. I hadn't heard Erica Jong, for example, on Hughes who she described as having a 'vampirish warlock appeal... he tried on me full force... He was a born seducer and only my terror of Sylvia's ghost kept me from being seduced' - and note that 'ghost', a connection to Jacqueline Rose's The Haunting of Sylvia Plath.

This is perhaps at its most passionate when it takes on the detractors of Plath herself, her writing and her readers, too often misrepresented as 'hysterical' young women, feminists and man or Hughes haters. There is still a struggle for the posthumous 'afterlife' of Plath, one already contaminated by the way the Hughes family repressed scholarship, biographies and destroyed the final journals and writing left unfinished at Plath's death. Some of that may well have been to protect the young children of the marriage (though the papers could have been sealed in an archive, rather than destroyed, surely?) but the interplay of Birthday letters with Plath's own poetry is testament to Hughes' dynamic re-writing of the story of this marriage which also turns Plath from raging, incandescent poet to object of his own poetic re-telling.

This book feels a little lax in places but it is a valuable and contemporary way of re-constituting Plath's life and writings for a 21st century audience.

(Full source notes and a selected bibliography and included)

[Janelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really interesting look at the life of Sylvia Plath by an author who loves her writing and also experienced violence at the hands of her partner. Through looking at what Plath said in her work and words, and what was suppressed, and the difficulties in writing biographies about her, the book presents lots of information on interpersonal violence, the ways women are silenced and much more. I particularly appreciated the chapter on Assia Wevill as it appears to me she is even more misrepresented, such a sad story. A book I found hard to put down (probably because of my own interests in death, mental illness, feminism etc)

[Tammy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poet, Ted Hughes, began mythologizing his wife poet, Sylvia Plath, immediately after her death. Van Duyne in LOVING SYLVIA PLATH attempts to shatter these myths and urges us to take Plath at her word. Needless to say, Hughes doesn’t fare very well between these pages and perhaps he shouldn’t. According to Van Duyne, Plath has told us repeatedly that she was abused both physically and emotionally. This is well-researched, feminist literary criticism that makes a top-notch companion piece to Heather Clark’s biography RED COMET: THE SHORT LIFE AND BLAZING ART OF SLYVIA PLATH.

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Largely dissertation-style research study and with a dash of semi-autobiographical passion project, this interesting book explores the connections between Sylvia Plath’s writing, life, and career, and posthumous Plath biography, literary criticism, and scholarship, all within the context of Plath’s experience of domestic violence in her relationship with her author spouse, who shall remain nameless in this review. (I’ve read so many works about Plath and I’ve just had enough of that guy: I’m sorry, he’s the absolute worst, especially after reading Red Comet and this.)


Whatever you may think of that spouse’s own literary efforts, this book lays unsparingly bare ample evidence for what we would easily be able to name today as a physically, emotionally, psychologically, and verbally abusive relationship, with the spouse’s abuse directed not only toward Plath, but also toward his mistress during his marriage to Plath who became his partner after Plath’s death, Assia Wevill, whose own life, death, and literary output is also explored here.


I’m going to admit I went into this book a bit skeptical. On one hand, I needed to read it, since I’ve loved Plath’s writing since I was an adolescent and I’ve also worked as a mental health counselor in the field of domestic violence survivor services for many years. On the other hand, I’ve already read a lot about Plath, including the superb and comprehensive Red Comet (perhaps the best biography of anyone I’ve ever read), so I wondered if there was any more to learn about Plath - a point that Van Duyn counters effectively in this book.


The author convincingly argues that the ideas that we have already “paid too much attention to” or “know everything about” Plath are merely extensions of the misogyny and reductive minimization Plath has experienced as a young woman author who wrote about women’s experiences; as a person with mental health struggles that unfortunately included death by suicide, but that do not define her and should not serve as her sole or primary legacy; and as a survivor of escalating relational abuse and intimate partner violence during her courtship and marriage to her spouse, who then used his influential position in literary circles as well as their marital status at time of death (though he’d left her for Wevill) to exert control over her literary estate and her memory, just as he had exerted coercive control throughout their relationship.


I remember that when I read Red Comet, I found it poignant, powerful, and useful to be able to employ mental health concepts we can better recognize today, including perinatal mental health and postpartum depression, other depressive disorders, and mis-prescribed prescription drug dependency, as frameworks for better understanding Plath’s life experience and literary work. In Plath’s own time, recognition, understanding, and “treatment” of such mental health concerns was pretty lacking and brutal, especially for women, and this persisted for some time after her death (and to the present day, of course, though progress has been made).


Likewise, I found there was great utility and insight in examining Plath’s life and literary output through the lens of intimate partner violence (IPV) - which, as a longtime professional in the field, I know is a widespread public health problem that affects all facets of a survivor’s life. IPV poses a significant risk factor especially for women’s (and children’s) wellbeing and with regard to essential needs such as housing and economic stability and physical and mental health, including risk of serious injury and fatality. Since the impacts of IPV are pervasively interwoven throughout all domains of a survivor’s life, it makes perfect sense to engage in some sustained, deep, detailed, and well-documented examination of Plath’s experience of it.


In short, this is a very sobering, but important and powerful read, and a useful and unique addition to the Plath scholarship canon, even including the fantastic Red Comet.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received this as a digital galley from NetGalley.

One of the things I loved about this new work of scholarship about Sylvia Plath was the reconsideration of previous scholarship (good & bad).

Also fuck Ted Hughes.

[T. Greenwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a Plath superfan since adolescence, I was drawn to this book and am so grateful to the author, the publisher, and Netgalley for the opportunity to get an early peek at it.

I have read many of the biographies cited in this book, and found it to be a compelling addition to the Plath catalog. My concern was that it might offer a simple rehashing of what has already been written. However, it is ultimately (and most importantly) a critical examination of the scholarship done thus far, particularly regarding the choices various biographers have made when it comes to the intimate partner violence between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. IPV is the filter through which Van Duyne examines Sylvia's life, work, and death. It was fascinating to see how scholars have protected the myth of Hughes at Plath's expense. The distillation of Plath's life to her tragic demise has always bothered me, and this book goes a long way in taking a more holistic look at her life and work as well as the culpability that not only Hughes but his apologists bear.

[David Ivany · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brilliant analysis of Plath's life and work that recognizes how she has been mythologized into a "posthumous writer", so fated to die that all of her work points to her passing. This work speaks in tandem with other biographies, but I appreciate Duyne's critique of how other biographers bend to the characterization by the Hughes estate.

Also, Ted Hughes can go f*ck himself. He's dead but he should be more dead. He stole the voices of women and shaped them for his benefit. Sylvia, Assia and Shura didn't die by his hand but he obliterated them afterwards. It's disheartening to read all of the instances of erasure by Hughes and his estate (and I'm a little more agitated than usual about it as I'm also reading Wifedom where George Orwell erases his, frankly, more interesting wife from his narrative works)

Would highly recommend this book but would recommend taking a stroll between sittings 😅

[Gabriella Papadakis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Obsessed!!!!!!! Not but seriously if you want to get even madder at the patriarchy this is the one. Crazy how we collectively dismissed Sylvia Plath as the crazy poet when she was just trying to tell us her husband was abusive. I wonder how many women we’ll dismiss as crazy before we start looking at WHO’s making them crazy lol. Let’s please please please rethink about how we’re treating public women <3

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

A forensic examination of the volatile relationship between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath and the way in which Hughes destroyed, censored and manipulated Plath’s art in order to suit his own narrative that she was destined for death since childhood and sacrificed herself for her art, as if his behaviour towards her was an irrelevance. While there have long been rumours that Hughes abused Plath, Van Duyne shows how the evidence has been hiding in plain sight all along, particularly with regard to his relationships with other women he similarly abused. After Plath died intestate Hughes was in control of how her work would be presented to the world, revising the order of poems in Ariel so that her death appeared an inevitability, destroying any of her journals that painted him in a bad light and censoring those letters and journals he did choose to publish, if only because of the considerable money to be made. With his newfound wealth he was in a position of power and influence and able to threaten lawsuits if prospective biographers failed to toe the line. His friends and colleagues gathered round and painted Plath as jealous and possessive and her fans as deranged feminists, while also airbrushing Assia Wevill and her child from history. While I have no doubt that Plath could be a difficult person, Hughes was certainly not blameless. Hughes and Plath were each other’s match and could be seen as a modern day Cathy and Heathcliff. He was charismatic and women found him extremely sexually attractive. Capitalising on his new fame, which he had achieved due to Plath’s hard work and financial scrimping, he was an inveterate womaniser, yet one who still required a ‘sweet home base’ to return to. Van Duyne’s expert analyses of Ariel, Capriccio and Birthday Letters show how Hughes manipulated the memories of Plath and Wevill as fated by the stars to kill themselves, as if he was not responsible for abandoning them with their children. Van Duyne’s own experiences as a survivor of domestic abuse are particularly insightful to this exploration of Plath. 10/10!

[Gen Dietzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never leave reviews beyond the star rating, but this book moved me so profoundly that it would be an injustice to give it five stars and walk away.

I cried reading the first three chapters and experienced a rage throughout the book that I did not expect to experience. Van Duyne’s work allowed for a reclamation of not only Plath’s brilliance but also Plath’s readers’ own stories. Often, as Van Duyne explains, Plath readers fall victim to misogynistic stereotypes that completely undermine Plath’s incredible contribution to literature and her readers’ ability to comprehend Plath’s work beyond the reductionist “tortured artist” trope.

Plath was not born to die. She did not love Ted Hughes so hard that it killed her. In writing about the 50+ year old elephant in the room, Van Duyne emphasized Plath’s voice that so many men in power tried to stifle over the years. Little by little, Van Duyne’s work reminds readers that Plath was a human, not a myth. I am deeply appreciative of this.

I rented this book from the library and will purchase it immediately. I know I will return to it time and time again.

[Elise Godfryd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thinking about what we leave behind to be remembered by, how inevitably inaccurate all of it is, the horrors of being utterly misunderstood not only in life but in death. This is what a biography ought to be. Screw New Criticism, feel everything.

"But I remain firm in my suspicion that young women are taught they must grow out of their love of Plath because grown women should love men."

[Lynn Wohlwend · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let’s just get this out of the way first: If you want to put the relationship between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes into a modern context all you need to know is that Hughes is Justin Timberlake, but only more talented and MUCH more deviant. Much like Timberlake used his relationship (and his own cheating) to rebrand Britney as the deviant heartbreaker, Hughes has capitalized on Plath’s memory both as muse and moneymaker to turn himself into the victim.

Ted Hughes is the OG Timberlake.

Frankly, Hughes comes off as a monster in this new book of research. It also seems fitting retribution since he basically tried to create a literary monster out of Plath, depicting her as an unstable woman whose own desire for poetry and art killed her. The book makes a strong case that Hughes’ partner violence—he likely sexually assaulted/beat Plath both during the marriage and while the divorce was pending—contributed to her depression and ultimately her death.

All the more reason it’s absolutely galling that Hughes ended up with control of Plath’s literary afterlife. The two were in the midst of a divorce when she died, and thus Hughes got rights to everything she'd written. And he had no qualms about changing things to his liking. He rearranged the order of her poems in Ariel, removing some he found too telling, he switched her publisher to his, he even advertised his OWN WORK in the back of her book. He destroyed her last novel and her journals, and tried to create a mythos that they were forever bonded as one.


Cry me a river, Ted.

Van Duyne writes: “The output of her final year astounded her husband, who spent the weeks after her death reading it aloud to visitors, telling them he planned to ‘auction’ it. Hughes recognized immediately that it would surpass artistic triumph to become a commercial and financial one, and by the 1980s, he reported making somewhere in the area of 150,000 (lbs) a year from Plath’s royalties.”

That part alone should infuriate. He literally EARNED hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties off of Plath’s manipulated memory, all the while claiming to love Plath like some star-crossed lover.

Here's Hughes on BBC's "Two of a Kind" in a 1961 interview when the two were still married: ... "It's like two people that are sympathetic to each other make up one person, they can make up one source of power which you both use and you can draw out material in incredible detail from this single shared mind."

How did Plath feel about this? Not great. She responded later: "I think perhaps I'm a little more practical about it, not quite so abstract."

While the book represents an outstanding amount of scholarship, that same scholarship begins to feel obtuse at times. Sometimes I really didn’t quite understand a reference, and I suspect this is because I wasn’t, and really am not, a huge Plath fan. There were also times where I felt like saying, okay, enough with the academic language. Like this example:


“She distinguishes between what she calls ‘an instance of silencing' and a 'practice of silencing’ to help us understand the difference between ‘reliable ignorance’ and ‘pernicious ignorance.’”

Basically, if you were expecting a Nancy Mitford-type biography, this ain’t it.

Towards the end, I also felt bad for Frieda (Sylvia and Ted's daughter), in spite of her continued belief that her father was the reason for Plath’s literary gifts. When Van Duyne meets Frieda quite by accident at Plath’s graveside, Frieda, you realize, will never even be afforded time alone with her mother in death. Van Duyne’s confession that she told Frieda she wasn’t the sort of Plath fan to show up with a chisel (a nod to the many people who have tried to pry Plath’s married name from her gravestone) seemed a bit … well, presumptuous. It can’t be easy being Sylvia Plath’s daughter.

Anyway, kudos for Van Duyne for taking on tough subjects. Long Live Sylvia Plath.

[Jenna Goldsmith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow Ted Hughes was a monster.

[jerry · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was so horrible I had to log on to Goodreads for the first time in over a decade to get this off my chest. I am a lifelong Plath fan (though admittedly, not formally a Plath scholar) and as such have read a plethora of books about her - some good, some mediocre, many bad. I was excited when I first heard about this book as I believe Plath is long overdue for Van Duyne's titular Reclamation . In the hands of popular culture, Plath has become shorthand for female hysterics and manic depressives; she is, to her detriment, seen as a dramatic if successful poetess who either wrote herself into madness or used her mental illness as a creative tool, depending on who you ask. As a woman and as a writer, I am overtired of telling people of my love for Plath and receiving eye rolls or "of course you do"s in response. I expected - perhaps too hopefully - that Van Duyne would cast aside the myth of Plath as manic poetess and focus on the strength of Plath's self and body of work.

Imagine my disappointment upon slogging through two hundred and thirty pages of poorly constructed arguments, research shoehorned into a ready-made thesis of Van Duyne's imagination (thesis may be too strong a word - did she really have one?), and perhaps the most elementary and contradictory poetry analysis ever committed to the page. Van Duyne's book is shallow and self-centered, her arguments wispy, her analysis a void. It seems as though Van Duyne came into the research process for this book having already decided what she would write, and it is evident in her circular and aimless voice.

Van Duyne shovels in analysis in the same way a first-year grad student does, realizing that she has spent a full book saying not much of anything at all and sprinkling in sociological and politically feminist buzzwords in the worst ways possible. Sources include...The Huffington Post and Maggie Nelson. Van Duyne's analysis reminds me of what it was like to write an essay the evening of the due date: just taking sources wherever you can find them and fitting them in even where they don't belong because you forgot your Jstor password and you need to submit by midnight.

Like many other fans of Plath, I too strongly dislike Ted Hughes. Van Duyne goes from dislike into sheer unbalanced slander - a position that is fine to take when discussing amongst friends, but to sincerely argue Hughes had an incestous relationship with his sister Olwyn, whatever your view on Olwyn's management of Plath's literary estate (spoiler: it was bad!) is beyond the pale. Her evidence for this is Plath comparing him to Lord Byron.

Van Duyne gives Hughes a spectral, God-like power over Hughes and Assia Wevill - I thought this was supposed to be a reclamation, so why does she seem to believe Plath had no agency over herself? Anything Plath did that Van Duyne does not see herself reflected in is presented as Hughes's influence, as unexplainable action, as an out of character turn. Van Duyne is also oddly puritanical about their relationship - Hughes was an abuser, surely, and anyone who argues otherwise is not to be trusted, but Van Duyne seems to believe Plath was trapped under him so that all of her actions after February of 1956 are not her own, but the product of Hughes's manipulation.

Further, Van Duyne was in desperate need of an editor; her turns of phrase are clunky and confusing and formatting/grammar errors abound (has she never heard of a compound hyphenated noun?).

Van Duyne includes an email exchange with the notoriously taciturn Plath-biographer-to-be Harriet Rosenstein, in which Rosenstein is initially intrigued by Van Duyne's research and open to speaking to her but only after reviewing her notes and research. Rosenstein decides not to speak with her upon reviewing: a wise choice, and I probably would have done the same.

[Jan Stinchcomb · Rating 5 out of 5]

A much needed addition and correction to existing studies of Plath. Van Duyne traces the origins of the mythology surrounding Plath, much of it coming from the Hughes camp, and shows how it influences public opinion, not to mention scholarship, to this day. Ted Hughes's highly unethical behavior is exposed for all to see. I am just as concerned here with his pillaging of Sylvia Plath's and Assia Wevill's literary estates as I am with his emotional and physical abuse of these women.
The chapter on Assia Wevill is generous and necessary; the author's visits to the graves of both Plath and Wevill are heartfelt and gratifying.

[Ginny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this would be about the mindset of Plath researchers and fans - as much about the fandom of Plath as the author. It feels like Van Duyne started out with that as the core of her essays but the recent discussions of intimate partner violence in the Hughes/Plath marriage changed the trajectory. It has aspects of a personal memoir that centre around domestic violence that I doubt would be part of the book had this not been a current topic. The Brontë quote Van Duyne drops at the end of the book best summarizes it: "Better to be without logic than without feeling". This is not to say that there isn't good scholarship here or that Van Duyne makes incorrect conclusions. But interest in Plath by any of us is mostly because of emotional attachment.

I first 'got into' Sylvia Plath in the early aughts when I was in junior high. I say 'got in' in the self-effacing way that Van Duyne has described Plath fan (girls, usually). I also mean it to reflect the kind of forensic reckoning that can easily overwhelm readers picking through the Plath's 30 years. There's been a slow reveal of facts and documents (the big strip tease, gentlemen, ladies) in the two and a half decades since I first read The Bell Jar. That there was so much to reveal was very surprising to me as a teen, and Van Duyne puts to paper expressions of the confusion I felt and feel. 

It happened so long ago (there are living people who witnessed these events as adults). Interviews were done and biographies begun within a decade of her death (most of these have never been published). Frieda Hughes is still alive and suffers greatly for the sake of the curious hoarde (she understands her father no more than any of us understand our fathers, and lost her mother before she was able to speak sentences, and thought her mother died of pneumonia until she was 11!). Assia and Shura Wevill's death was openly known in British literary circles (they are rarely mentioned in Plath bios after the 70s and before the 2000s).

I read the reaction to the description of Hughes' abuse in 2017 with surprise not because I disbelieved it, but because I thought it was a known fact already. After a few years of not reading Plath's work or biographies (trying to distance myself from my own depression), I reread a lot in the past few years partially because I was convinced Hughes' abuse had already been established. His abuse of other women had been. Why not Sylvia? What had my teen mind seen in her poems that made me so sure that the violence existed? Did I just assume it of all men of Hughes' age? I do wish Van Duyne had addressed some of the generational and cultural differences in views of abuse. It's likely it would be read as dismissive of the degree of abuse, but I think it diffuses some of the argument that the abuse didn't happen because some contemporaries deny observing it. What would have constituted an abusive marriage to an outsider - especially a white male outsider - in the 50s and 60s is not what we would recognize as abuse today. I also think that constantly quoting Anne Sexton but never mentioning Sexton's status as an abuser is a misstep, especially in the analyses of power dynamics in abuse. I also read Van Duyne's discussions of abuse against Black women as trying to forego criticisms of lack of racial awareness rather than genuine engagement with intersectional feminism.

I did enjoy Loving Sylvia Plath but/and it made me self conscious. Plath scholarship is so prurient and yet I do want so many of the grisly details. I don't know why. My life has diverged from a teen-with-depression-and-dead-father enough to not identify with her anymore. There are sudden deaths in my own family that lack context, details, witnesses, resolution, and the idea of people writing books about those is distasteful. But there is so much conflicting evidence, and Van Duyne confronts it - literally approaching Frieda Hughes at her mother's cemetery and taking the liberty of marking Assia and Shura's suspected ash scattering place with no noted consultation of Assia's surviving niece and nephews. The absolute nerve. And yet I understand. I reread the minute contradictions of the events and archaeology of Sylvia's life as if I'm going to uncover something. The why is not fully addressed for Van Duyne or any other biographer in Van Duyne's book.

There was Plath's accounting, and there was Hughes' accounting, and we feel prompted to be a tiebreaker. The spectre of burnt diaries and missing letters sometimes resolves into a physical visitation in this history but only generates more disagreement. He strangled her with his hands (they were making love and she choked somehow else). Assia was a turning point (he wasn't faithful at any point in their marriage, Assia was just the first after they began to have children). They were going to be reconciled (Plath consulted a divorce lawyer shortly before her death). Poetry killed her, Hughes killed her, being a single mother in an icy foreign country killed her (she was profoundly depressed, possibly had PMDD, was not so far from her son's birth as to not be considered for PPD, had a history of suicide attempts, possibly had a head injury shortly before her death - probably only Beth Hinchcliffe and maybe Rosenstein have seen the autopsy amongst Plath scholars, but her doctor describes scalp bruising he will not attribute as perimortem). She meant herself to be found and saved (her doctor at the time of her death has said repeatedly that she took a fatal amount of sleeping pills before opening the oven). Her last letter to Aurelia was lost in transit (Hughes deliberately kept it from her). She could have been saved by having enough money for a reliable nanny (Aurelia posted her some $4000 at the beginning of 1963). She orchestrated her death to secure her fame (she did not secure her papers or literary legacy away from Hughes before death). She was difficult, shallow, created a false face through her journals (even devoted Hughes fans call him complicated, dour and controlling of his image). She created some of the best poetry of the 20th century while ramping up to suicide (none of that poetry is worth her children growing up without her, with the inheritance of suicide). She is a ghost, a banshee, she is still speaking and shrieking (she is dead, and all her awareness ended in February 1963, and nothing we do now reaches her or touches her or helps her).

[Ella · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a beautiful and important new biography of Sylvia Plath. Emily Van Duyne explores Plath's experience with domestic violence at the hands of her husband, Ted Hughes, and why this history has been covered up by Hughes himself and other critics. Plath's death is often romanticized, but Van Duyne points to DV as an important factor in Plath's mental illness and ultimate death by suicide.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sylvia Plath, and her fans, have long been symbols of female hysteria: overwrought, depressed, and obsessed with death. And while Heather Clark’s definitive 2020 biography Red Comet did much to dispel that myth and give a fuller picture of Sylvia Plath’s life, that old stereotype still lingers. Emily Van Duyne’s new book interrogates that stereotype while contending that Sylvia was a victim of intimate partner violence, and her legacy and reputation were heavily edited by Ted Hughes. This book is both an academic look and a personal reflection on Van Duyne’s feelings about Sylvia Plath. She focuses especially closely on Sylvia’s poem’s about marriage, and discusses the difficulties that many biographers and scholars faced when attempting to get a full picture of the famous poet after her death.

Does the world need yet another book about Sylvia Plath? As a huge Plath fan, I would say yes! After reading Red Comet I did not think there would be much left to say, but it was interesting how Van Duyne focused on a specific area of Plath’s life (and death) - the intimate partner violence she suffered at the hands of Ted Hughes. While there is not necessarily anything new here in the way of information, the way that Van Duyne works with the same material everyone else has does feel new - she uses it to shine a light on one specific area and then discusses how that has impacted Plath’s legacy. I would not necessarily recommend this to readers who are new to Plath or who want a full biography, but I would certainly recommend it to Plath fans.

Thank you to NetGalley and Norton for the electronic advanced reader copy!

[Olivia Simpson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot recommend this highly enough. And also ugh!!!!!!!! I’m so angry! This is #FREEBRITNEY adjacent!
I *REMEMBER* being in first year perusing a used bookstore and being interested in a Sylvia Plath book but didn’t buy it because I thought she was some depressing moody feminist who killed herself. And the only reason I read this was because a Substack I love recommended it and I found the authors mini-interview compelling. AND NOW HERE I AM FEELING ENRAGED AND DEVASTATED of the narratives I have unknowingly held about Plath my entire life. A well-documented survivor of IPV (FUCK YOU FOREVER TED HUGHES) her writing, voice, perspective, and HUMANITY have been utterly fucked with since her death. Now I’m reading her *Unabridged* Journals (bc again, FUCK YOU TED HUGHES) and I just want to know her more.

[Van · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a book that proclaims to be about Sylvia Plath, that is actually primarily about Ted Hughes, and that I suspect was originally supposed to be about Harriet Rosenstein.

Basically, this book is all over the place. There’s no discernible cohesive thesis and what ideas she does set out to prove she never really follows through on. Some chapters just randomly end and the next one picks up somewhere completely different. Where a chapter starts is rarely related to where it ends. There’s simply no overarching topic to this book. It’s disappointing because there’s some bits that are really profound, but they just feel lost and out-of-context.

[Tiffany · Rating 5 out of 5]

@ my town librarian, thank you for placing this book on YOUR to-read list. i wouldn't have known of this book! it's funny how i was able to get a hold of the book on a hot summer day this past month. actually. i SNATCHED it.

[Catie]

Mentioned in Ann Kennedy Smith’s ‘Lost In The Archives’ Newsletter - July 15th 2024

[Branwen Sedai *of the Brown Ajah* · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I must be lean & write & make worlds besides this to live in."

If you only read one book about Sylvia Plath, make it this one!

[Lowen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I became more familiar with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by coincidence as a result of their mention in the previous book I read. I went on to watch Ted Hughes: Stronger than Death… good lord did this ever give me the wrong perception.

I truthfully read the book because I was enthralled with the love story of Plath and Hughes. I’ve come out the other side as a more educated feminist and with a vastly different perception of their relationship.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing, I knew Emily wouldn’t let me down

[Julia Marie Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Emily Van Duyne has taken her studies in Sylvia Plath to a new and heartbreakingly truthful level. In this book we read about the truth - about how the 'myth' of Plath was continually and from the beginning misogynized to de-empazise her skill, her talent, and her life. If you are a Plath lover and are interested in finding out how her life really went down - read this book. I ordered it in advance. Loved it.

[Alena · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read a little bit of Sylvia Plath in school, her poems, and a little bit about her life, Loving Sylvia Plath is not a biography, it is not for those who know nothing about Plath, it's for those who have read her and are attracted to her life, her poems, her legacy. It's a book about the author's death, the myth/cult that formed around her, and her impact on literary circles and women worldwide. It also talks about the reasons that led to her end, toxic partners, abuse, and misogynistic society, and intertwines it with contemporary topics, like the Me Too movement. the abusive relationship between Plath and Hughes is something that many women can sadly identify with, and is one of the reasons why Sylvia Plath is so important, her poems were very personal and raw, you can feel seen in her words.

The author's admiration for Plath is evident, it is a well-researched story that does not make Sylvia Plath a victim, nor does it justify her, it makes her a real person and empathizes with her. It is a tough, straight-to-the-point novel that doesn't hold back or sugarcoat anything. This reclamation provides information that other biographies do not include or do not take into account, it not only talks about Plath but also about Ted Hughes and his physical and psychological abuse, it emphasizes how normalized an abusive relationship is and how many of the actions are not seen as a red light, how it affects the mental health of the other person, no matter how brave and brilliant you are.

Despite the title, Sylvia is not the only protagonist, so are Ted Hughes and Assia Wevill, I didn't know much about her, apart from being the other woman, but it's refreshing to see another point of view than just seeing her as the villain. Hughes has never been my favorite, and now he is less so, how is it possible for him to have an impact on the figure of both women even decades after their deaths? It's an examination of Plath's life, in a way that I had not read before, it emphasizes the mistreatment, and it is a great analysis and a must for fans of the author.

Overall is a raw, emotional read, it is not very long but it is a hard story because of how realistic it is, read it if you are a fan of the author and want to go deeper about her, especially from a new perspective, more modern and from the female point of view.

Thanks for the copy TLC Book Tours and W. W. Norton & Company.

[Kara]

I’ve read a lot of Plath and a lot about Plath, including Heather Clark’s very good and very thorough biography Red Comet. I appreciate Van Duyne’s defense of Plath and her readers—it isn’t immature or frivolous to appreciate Plath’s poetry or be interested in her life. Van Duyne’s book isn’t just another biography but looks to examine Plath’s life and work through the lens of intimate partner violence (IPV). Van Duyne cites evidence from both Plath’s and Hughes’s writings to support her thesis. She also pulls from her own lived experiences—as a victim of IPV herself, she recognizes similar qualities/signs in Plath’s life. I’m on the fence about how to rate this because while I found many of Van Duyne’s arguments convincing, I also worried the overall thesis was a little reductive and oversimplified Plath’s struggles with her mental health, which predated her even meeting Hughes. Occasionally I found sections redundant, and sometimes Van Duyne veered a little too heavily into academic jargon, but overall I appreciate that there are still Plath lovers and scholars examining her life and work from new angles.

[Erica Hersh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe more like 3.5 or 3.75.

Sometimes, when people try to correct or amend a record, they go too far in the other direction. That’s kind of the case here, but Ted Hughes was clearly a pretty terrible guy (at best) so I’d rather have someone go too far in that direction than the “official” record.

I learned a lot about Sylvia Plath and her legacy, but the book was much more academic than I expected. It made some parts a bit hard to get through, but realistically, the issue is that the book isn’t marketed that way at all.

Overall, an intense, interesting read though.

[Rebecca Brenner Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

a fascinating narrative nonfiction about how we know what we know about Sylvia Plath over time. also engages people’s feeling re: Sylvia Plath. I love how the author references other biographies in text, ideal for audio listening. I also appreciated the full chapter on Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes’s other partner who killed herself, a beautiful & complicated woman in her own right. content warnings for suicide and domestic violence