Sylvia Plath

A Biography

By: Linda Wagner-Martin

Narrated by: Xe Sands

Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's summary

Sylvia Plath is widely recognized as one of the outstanding poets of the 20th century. When her Collected Poems was published it won the Pulitzer Prize. Her only published novel, The Bell Jar, has become a modern classic.

Because Plath drew so heavily on her own life in both her poetry and her fiction, the outlines of her life are familiar to listeners. But, like most writers, Plath changed the facts of her life in her writing. In her determination to be both wife and mother, on the one hand, and teacher and writer on the other, Plath tried simultaneously to fulfill and to fight the conventions that bound women in the 1950s. In this biography, the first to draw on unpublished journals and letters recently made available, Linda Wagner-Martin examines the ironies and contradictions of Sylvia Plath's life, as well as her achievements.

©1987 Linda Wagner-Martin (P)2020 Tantor

Good Overview

The book is a good overview if you have not read anything about her life and not too bad even if you have read other books on Plath. Red Comet is far superior if you are looking for detail. I have read many books over the years about her life and this is one of the better in some respects but in many others it is dramatically abbreviated. The narrator selection was very odd to the point where I listened to other samples of her work to see if her speech was unique to this book or just her. It was the latter and for me, not well suited for nonfiction.

A fairly brief, but interesting overview of Plath’s life

This was very well-written, and the narrator had such a great voice for this title. Very warm and expressive, I was really impressed.

The book was a good overview of Plath’s life. I also recently listened to a biography about Shirley Jackson, and that book in combination with this one, just really drives home for me how these talented mid-century women had to labor under the suffocating expectations and restrictions of a patriarchal culture. Both of them had inadequate mental and physical health care, and had to put up with absolute GARBAGE men.

I haven’t read anything by Plath in awhile, and this book made me want to go back and read more works by her.

My only complaint is that I wish it could have been a bit longer, and had time to delve more into their social circle, and more of her writings. As is mentioned in the forward, Hughes exercised so much control over her work posthumously, that there is much we don’t know about her last days.