I do not review books I have not finished reading. But for Red Comet (published 2020) by Heather Clark, I’ll break that rule. I have good news to share that cannot wait.
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art if Sylvia Plath is more than a just a good book. It is a manual for life if you decide to live the creative life like Sylvia Plath did.
Let me backtrack. Who was Sylvia Plath and why should you care about her? Without Plath (1932-1963), one could argue, many topics would still be taboo in polite society, not to mention literature and art. We would still consider mental illness a hushed subject, the mixed feelings that come with motherhood never talked about, the parent and child “never ending war” not considered. Or even allowed to exist as something we should talk about. But above all, language would be all the poorer but for Plath’s breakthroughs in the last three years of her life. Her poems like Daddy, Lady Lazarus, Morning Song and Ariel are among the best of the 20th century.
Those achievements were no fluke. Just one or two of them would be the proud legacy of an artist. Plath would not be contented with being acclaimed as one of the best female poets of her generation. She wanted to be the best poet of her generation, even if that meant she would be competing with her husband Ted Hughes who would later be crowned the English poet laureate. Her achievements are all the more impressive when you consider how stacked the odds were against her.
Red Comet is the perfect book to remind us, through many delineated lives, how some mores have been so thoroughly abandoned that if we did not have eye witnesses, we would not believe some of the strictures that ruled society and ruined lives. There was a time, for example, when women were not expected to become writers. They could not possibly, it was assumed, have anything of world changing importance to say.
If a woman somehow insisted on writing and declined to follow the flickering ladylike tradition of adopting a pseudonym, she was supposed to limit herself to topics in the domestic realm. Cooking, dresses, etiquette. That should be enough. The rare subversives like George Eliot, George Sand and Jane Austen were grudgingly accepted only because the quality of their work so surpassed many of their peers that they could not be ignored. They had too many imitators.
To read Red Comet is to see first-hand how one such rebel against the constraints of her time come into being. The daughter of German immigrants, Plath was born with the overachieving chip over her shoulder that would never leave her. Her father Otto Plath had striven from an apprentice blacksmith in native Germany to a professor of Entomology. In a foreshadowing of his daughter’s rebelliousness, he declined to be ordained a Lutheran minister despite the fact that his education depended on his grandparents who had made that a condition for his further education. When he died suddenly, Sylvia’s mother Aurelia Frances Plath picked up his responsibilities without missing a beat. The hardworking housewife who had deferred her writing dreams or nascent high school teaching career would end up steadily climbing until she reached the rank of an associate professor at Boston University.
Aurelia’s daughter Sylvia believed her mother could and should have advanced even much further than that. If only Aurelia had been more persistent in bumping her head against the invisible but firm glass ceiling that existed for women in the workplace during her time in the United States and much of the western world. Plath herself lived her life in a race to break through whatever barriers society dared place in her path as the child of immigrants, as a girl and later a wife and mother.
Plath belonged to that generation of women in the west that came to maturity just before the explosion of the feminism movement. Long before feminism, Plath decided to challenge for all the shinning trophies of her time she was not supposed to try for: to be a great poet, a good wife, mother and have a career all at the same time. While battling lifelong depression.
If you know the Sylvia Plath story, you know how this turns out. Red Comet expects you to. Nonetheless, the build-up to the events of February 11, 1963 is heart breaking. Red Comet excels in in detailing how she tried for all the prizes she was not supposed to and despite the odds, we remember her because she succeeded.
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