New Sylvia Plath Memoir Excerpted at TIME

An excerpt from Heather Clark's RED COMET: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (Penguin, 2020) is up at TIME this week, and focuses on a second honeymoon in Cape Cod for Plath and Ted Hughes. But the trip "yielded little in the way of new writing," writes Clark. A further excerpt:

…She had not published a story in a women’s magazine in five years, and she spent much of her time in … trying to write fiction that would sell. She wanted to show the editors at the “slicks” that the twenty-year-old adolescent writer had transformed into a more mature literary voice. But she feared that creative paralysis would bring on another depression.

While Hughes began writing the poems that would go into his second collection, Lupercal, Plath worked on four stories. None would be published, but it was during this time that she outlined the plot and themes—in “The Trouble-Making Mother”—that would become the basis for The Bell Jar…

Clark's book was also the subject of this recent feature on the Poetry Foundation website. Continue reading the excerpt at TIME.