Red Comet

driven young man who would not compromise his ideals, even if that meant severing ties with his family a decision that would have a profound impact on his daughter.
 
At least three generations of the Plath family lived in Posen Province, West Prussia, before coming to America. Today Posen (Poznan) is part of Poland, in the area known as the Polish Corridor when it was transferred from the German empire to Poland after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Like the Alsace-Lorraine region, it became a disputed territory, where tensions between ethnic Poles and Germans ran high. Despite the fact that the majority of those living in this area were Poles, Hitler attempted to annex it in 1939 one of the early acts of aggression that spurred France, Britain, and other Commonwealth nations to declare war on Germany. Though Otto Plath left Posen in 1900, well before both world wars, his daughter would eventually portray him as an embodiment of German imperialist aggression in Daddy.
 
Posen, whose population comprised Germans, Poles, and Jews who lived in separate ethnic enclaves, was perhaps the poorest region in Prussia. By the late 1800s, ethnic Germans, lured by the booming industrial economy in the Rhine and Ruhr regions, as well as free land in America, began leaving the region en masse in the Ostflucht, or flight from the east. More than two million had left by the early 1900s, including Sylvia Plath s paternal great-grandparents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and father. Her great-grandfather, Johann Plath, was an illiterate farmer, but his grandson Otto would eventually become a Harvard-educated professor, and his great-granddaughter a trailblazing poet and novelist. Sylvia s perfectionism, often derided as neurotic or pathological, nee

Boston Globe
 
Revelatory. . . . Plath s struggles with depression and her marriage to Ted Hughes emerge in complex detail, but Clark does not let Plath s suicide define her artistic achievement, arguing with refreshing rigor for her significance to modern letters. The result is a new understanding and appreciation of an innovative, uncompromising poetic voice.
The New Yorker
 
A definitive biography. . . . What ultimately bursts off the page is Plath s short, vibrant life, which is too often most remembered for the way it ended: That s the irony, isn t it? says Clark. She s so incredibly alive.
Entertainment Weekly
 
Red Comet is absolutely necessary. . . . In Clark s attentive hands, Plath s life is laid out in its full complexity.
Lit Hub

Aiming to shake the public perception of Sylvia Plath as the Marilyn Monroe of the literati, Clark delivers a meticulous, unflinching and fresh view of the brilliant, troubled poet.  
People
 
Surely the final, the definitive, biography of Sylvia Plath . . . Takes its time in desensationalizing the life and the art; this lets Clark place both firmly in the literary and politically engaged contexts that formed them and simultaneously demonstrate how Plath s work, in return, gifted the writing life unimaginable new sinew.
The Guardian ( The Best Books of 2020 )

Red Comet is a mighty achievement. Clark is compassionate, clear-eyed, sceptical. Each chapter reads with the ease of a novel. . . . Plath s resilience, genius and insight blaze through the book.
The Times (UK)
 
Clark entices us with the impossible: an unbiased, authorised biography of Sylvia Plath. . . . Red Comet is the kind of serious literary biography Plath has long deserved but, until now, not received.
New Statesman (UK)
 
Unlike other biographies of Plath (1932-63), Clark s traces her subject s literary and intellectual development rather than concentrating on her undoing through suicide. . . . A masterful biography, that will especially interest literary scholars.
Library Journal
 
[A] page-turning, meticulously researched biography of Sylvia Plath. . . . Clark s in-depth scholarship and fine writing result in a superb work that will deliver fresh revelations to Plath s many devoted fans.
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
A sober and detailed critical biography of one of the 20th century s greatest and most misunderstood poets. . . . Redeems Plath from the condescension of easy interpretation.
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Once I started reading this book, I couldn t stop; I read it upon waking and late at night, at the dinner table and during the workday. I thought I knew Plath, but this wonderful book shows me I did not. Like the lyric speakers of her late poetry, she emerges from these pages transformed. Red Comet presents Sylvia Plath as she ought to be: as an innovative, ambitious, driven artist, at a time when women weren t supposed to be any of these things. In the end, I was awestruck by Plath s courage and strength in the face of so many obstacles; I was awed, too, by the work Clark has done to bring this writer to life.
Maggie Doherty, author of The Equivalents