If your
reaction to this picture is "Oh God, not more Sylvia Plath," I
suggest you look away now, because this is Sylvia Plath week, as you can't have
failed to notice.
Forgive
me if this is a grandma/ egg scenario, but fifty years ago this week (February
11th 1963), Sylvia Plath committed suicide at the age of thirty, leaving behind
her estranged husband poet Ted Hughes and their small son and daughter. It was
barely a month after the publication of The Bell Jar, the fictionalised account
of the summer of 1953, when she was a guest editor on the now-defunct US
magazine Mademoiselle. Since then, the original angry young woman has become a
heroine to screwed up teenage girls everywhere. Which is where I come in.
My
dog-eared and coffee-mug stained edition of The Bell Jar, and all my other
Plath ephemera, dates from the mid-80s, but looking back through my tattered
copy of her collected poems, I know now that my understanding of her was
limited. Because apart from the time chronicled in The Bell Jar I knew little
of her life before 1956. Her pre-Hughes life.
But a
fascinating new biography (written without the co-operation of the Plath
estate, which is run by Hughes' widow) sets out to put that right. Mad Girl's
Love Song by Andrew Wilson takes its name from one of her early poems (one not
included in my well-thumbed Hughes-edited edition of Plath's collected work)
and in so doing, puts a whole other complexion on things. Focussing on her life
up to the moment she met Hughes ("the big, dark, hunky boy") at Cambridge,
it examines the defining moments in her life. Her father's death. Her
suffocating relationship with her mother. Her early suicide attempt and
subsequent treatment. And ends with the choice she made between three men: her
boyfriend Gordon Lameyer, Richard Sassoon (who maybe should have been 'the
one') and Hughes. The rest, we pretty much know.
There has
been much (admittedly pointless) speculation on the course Plath's life might
have taken had she lived in a different era. A time when her class and gender
might have proved less restricting, when sexual mores were more relaxed and
angry young women were allowed to express their fury. A time like now, ish.
After all, we might all love Mad Men, but who would want to live through it?
Last
week, Girls creator Lena Dunham speculated that a Plath today might have been a
blogger, for slate.com, for instance. I like that image. I'll keep it with me.
Plath's take on New York fashion week would have been a joy to behold, I'm sure.
She might
have dumped Ted Hughes before they inflicted untold damage. He, in his turn,
might have dumped her. She might have got on a plane and followed Richard
Sassoon to Spain. She might not have been given ECT. She might have lived. But
the truly tragic thing is, I fear she might not.
Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and life before Ted is published by Simon & Schuster, £20, and is Radio4's Book of the Week this week. The Bell Jar is published by Faber, £7.99.
(This piece was first published on Bazaar on Books blog www.harpersbazaar.co.uk/blogs, 13th February 2013.)
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