Word: sylvia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Rough Magic is a gripping, exhaustively researched study of the ever-fascinating Sylvia Plath. Paul Alexander is the first biographer to write without the permission of the Hughes estate, and from this stem both the book's weakness and its strength. Had the book been dependent on the approval of the estate, Alexander would never have been able to make the convincing argument that Plath's stormy marriage had a direct, if not causal, relationship to her suicide. On the other hand, the Hughes estate would probably have excised many of Alexander's overly simplistic generalizations...
Alexander unflinchingly targets Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, as a major factor in her suicide. From his first mention of Hughes, his violence, power and promiscuity are emphasized. What finally persuades the reader are Alexander's use of statements made by Plath: "Sylvia also said Hughes made an admission: he and Assia [his mistress] had speculated that, in light of her past emotional problems, Sylvia might already have killed herself. If she were dead, Hughes told Plath, he could sell Court Green and take Frieda [their daughter...
Like her contemporary Sylvia Plath, Sexton had a gift of the self- dramatizing and self-destructive kind. She was the mad housewife of Weston, Mass., beautiful if you caught her in the right light, "a possessed witch," as she thought of herself sometimes, "haunting the black air, braver at night." Both Plath and Sexton wound up as cautionary tales. In 1963 Plath stuck her head in an oven in London. Sexton told her psychiatrist, "Sylvia Plath's death disturbs me. Makes me want it too. She took something that was mine, that death was mine!" Eleven years later...
INTERVIEW Sylvia Ann Hewlett excoriates our treatment of children...
...Sylvia, you look great! Not a day older...