The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

Red Comet

The first biography of this great and tragic poet that takes advantage of a wealth of new material, this is an unusually balanced, comprehensive and definitive life of Sylvia Plath.

A first-class biography... Red Comet is a mighty achievement. Clark is compassionate, clear-eyed, sceptical. Each chapter reads with the ease of a novel... I couldn't put it down.

Rescuing Sylvia Plath from the cult of her fans...[Red Comet,] a terrific, even-handed biography of Plath frees the poet from the narrow view of her as 'a mind on course for suicide'... Heather Clark's meticulous research, sweeping up every scrap, deftly integrates drafts, unpublished pieces, stories and critiques of poems...to make this extraordinary story more moving than ever.

At last, there is Red Comet, a major biography that recognises Sylvia Plath...and recovers her from cliché. It is a superbly researched, fluent and assured book...and Heather Clark writes with a rare empathy and understanding of her subject... Not one sentence seems extraneous... Red Comet reveals Plath as she ought to be seen.

Clark's defining project, both a joyful affirmation for Plath fanatics and a legitimization of her legacy... Clark masterfully analyses the poetry with intelligent incorporation of the biography... In this mammoth biography of a short, troubled life, the deepest impression is of [Plath's] resilience and dogged energy.

Finally, the biography that Sylvia Plath deserves, one that takes her seriously as both a poet and a person. Combining rigorous research with in-depth literary analysis and immersive style, Heather Clark's magisterial book not only traces Plath's influences and inspirations, but also chronicles her often-tumultuous relationships with respect and empathy. A spectacular achievement.

Ruth Franklin, author of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

[Sylvia Plath] as she really was, with and without Ted Hughes.

An exciting contribution not only to Plath studies but to biography, poetics, cultural history, and feminist history and theory, Red Comet is an extraordinary book. Clark animates Plath anew, both through the very dailiness of her life - rendered gripping and engrossing - and through the brilliant situating of Plath (and her stormy marriage to Ted Hughes) in the larger, indelibly evoked Anglo-American poetic context. Clark delivers a brilliant scholarly exegesis in vivid prose that renders Plath's life into art. This is the major biography of this major poet that we have long awaited.

Mary V. Dearborn, author of Ernest Hemingway: A Biography

With Red Comet Heather Clark has produced a superb biography, scholarly, acutely perceptive and beautifully written. She shows a profound understanding not only of Plath and her work, but also of the worlds she inhabited on both sides of the Atlantic. This is without doubt one of the most remarkable biographies of the present era.

Selina Hastings, author of The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

Red Comet contains a vital ingredient that wasn't available to previous Plath biographers: access to her surviving letters... Nor does she reduce this complex tragic story to a simple tale of good versus evil.

[A] marvellous biography of Sylvia Plath.

The Times *Literary Nonfiction Books of the Year*

Sylvia Plath's extraordinary poetic gifts have been overshadowed by her death. A new biography sets that right... Red Comet is neither unduly reverential towards its subject, nor driven to fetishise the details of Sylvia Plath's final days. It is a life in the fullest and best sense of that word.

The closest any writer has come to an exhaustive biography of Plath's life and work

Sylvia Plath's story has been overshadowed by her death, but Clark's meticulous, even-handed and surprisingly uplifting biography emphasises her lust for life, and her ambition to succeed as wife, mother and poet.

Red Comet... [is] a masterpiece, so richly researched and detailed, it's awe-inspiring and you feel as if you've stepped into a time machine back to the 1950s and 60s

Heather Clark is the author of four works of non-fiction, including Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (published by Jonathan Cape), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Prize in Biography, and was the winner of the Slightly Foxed Prize and the Truman Capote Prize (awarded by the Iowa Writers’ Workshop). It was a Book of the Year in the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Times and New York Times. Her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Time, Lit Hub, and TLS. She has recently received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Centre. The Scrapbook is her debut novel.

The first biography of this great and tragic poet that takes advantage of a wealth of new material, this is an unusually balanced, comprehensive and definitive life of Sylvia Plath. 
 
'Surely the final, the definitive, biography of Sylvia Plath' Ali Smith 
 
 *WINNER OF THE SLIGHTLY FOXED PRIZE 2021* 
 *A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH AND THE TIMES* 
 *FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE IN BIOGRAPHY 2021* 
 
Drawing on a wealth of new material, Heather Clark brings to life the great and tragic poet, Sylvia Plath. Refusing to read Plath's work as if her every act was a harbinger of her fate, Clark evokes a culture in transition in the mid-twentieth century as she thoroughly explores Sylvia's world. We see Plath's early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; we witness her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes; and, through clear-eyed portraits of the demonised players in the arena of her suicide, we gain a deeper understanding of her final days. 
 
Featuring illuminating readings of Plath's poems, Red Comet brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women the world over. 
 
'A first-class biography . . . Each chapter reads with the ease of a novel . . . I couldn't put it down' The Times

Heather Clark

Phenomenal... Worthy of reading and rereading

Clark, in prose at the same time richly philosophical and light of touch, accomplishes a double feat. She has written both an aching love story and an incisive examination of the politics of memory

An incredibly smart novel, with an intricate and perfectly paced depiction of a delicate and intense relationship. It's as if a Sally Rooney novel merged with Richard Linklater's film, Before Sunrise

Clark uses her first novel to explore a highly literary and highly troubled relationship... At once a rich historical novel and a philosophical study of how much influence past generations have on our affections

Offer[s] a flying tour of literary representations of the Holocaust and its legacy—a lightly annotated reading list that includes fiction writers such as Tadeusz Borowski and W. G. Sebald—as well as a meditation on the cost of political crimes to a nation’s trustworthiness and honor, even generations later

It’s a wonderful novel; highly literary, yet page turning... It’s the sort of book you press on everyone you know, and spend hours discussing, once they’ve read it too

A swiftly-moving, molecularly perceptive, singular portrait of intoxicating young love. Clark captures the psychological nuances and emotional currents of two youthful intellects wrestling with the weight of history and questions of legacy, moral responsibility, and the blinders and dissonance of a complicated romance

Aube Rey Lescure, author of River East, River West

An elegant, unsettling novel about the burden of history and the illusions of love. With a biographer’s eye for detail and a novelist’s grasp of human frailty, The Scrapbook traces the fault lines between past and present, between nations and individuals, revealing how history lingers—not in grand narratives, but in intimate entanglements

Through an exquisitely observed love affair, Clark explores how the Nazis’ lingering legacy can still haunt the lives of those born long after the war. A stunningly good novel.

Julia Boyd, author of A Village in the Third Reich

Puts the ferocity and obsession of young love into play with huge historical forces

Heather Clark’s The Scrapbook is a masterpiece. This beautifully crafted, quietly devastating love story reminds us of the epic impact of the Second World War across continents and through generations, its scars perhaps most poignantly felt in the intimate interactions between two solitary people

Rebecca Donner, author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days

Ingeborg Bachmann once asked, “When will the war be over?” Heather Clark’s debut novel, The Scrapbook, offers an answer to this timeless question in a work of searing tenderness. An intimate portrait of youthful romance, haunted by the shadow of the second world war, Clark meticulously captures the melancholy inheritance of a generation trying to find their place amidst the rubble of the past. The initiations of first love, the scars it leaves behind, The Scrapbook reminds us that we’re never as far from history as we’d like to imagine, and it reminds us just how much we must give up in order to move on. Beautifully written, brilliantly researched. A stunning quiet work you won’t be able to put down

Samantha Rose Hill, author of Hannah Arendt

Historical fiction strikes a complicated balance, between a need to recreate with some accuracy events in the past while at the same time communicating the relevance of those facts to the present. Heather Clark situates a contemporary love story in the shadow of - and with capacious insight into - German history both during and immediately after the Second World War. Clark navigates difficult conceptual ground with remarkable ease, making the complex legacy of the war appreciable to readers in the present

Clark has achieved an impressive feat in this beautiful and powerful novel examining the nature of intergenerational trauma, inherited guilt and all consuming love

In her elegant, calmly unsettled debut novel, Heath Clark illustrated how the cold shadow of German history bleeds constantly into the present, even in the most intimate spheres… a novel of beautiful surfaces and uneasy depths

Clark grapples with history, latching onto inspiration from her grandfather’s World War II scrapbook. This intense story explores first love between American and German university students who must uncover and reconcile the past to forge a future

Immersive... Clark is interrogating whether past misdeeds implicate future generations—and whether they should

Finely wrought... The Scrapbook is a fascinating tangle of yearning, history, and legacy

Examines the moral implications of the past for those living in the present... Anna and Christophe’s restlessly intelligent conversations raise juicy questions about the extent to which individuals are complicit with a nation's history

Gripping from the start, written with confident concision and directness

'A first-class biography . . . Each chapter reads with the ease of a novel . . . I couldn't put it down'

A debut novel about a life-changing romance in the long shadow of European history, inspired by the author's real discovery. 
 
'A singular portrait of intoxicating young love' AUBE REY LESCURE 
 
'You wouldn't be able to put it down' SAMANTHA ROSE HILL 
 
For years after I tried to tell myself that what happened between us was hardly worth remembering. 
 
Harvard, 1996. Anna is about to graduate when she meets Christoph, a German student visiting campus. They only spend a week together – discussing art, ideas and history – but it is long enough for Anna to fall desperately in love. Anna begins to visit Christoph in Germany. As she tries to understand the young, elegant man who fascinates her, he reveals his country to her. 
 
Germany is still reckoning with the Holocaust and its pretty new squares and grand facades belie its recent history and the war’s destruction. Christoph condemns his country’s actions but remains vague about the part his own grandparents played. Anna’s grandfather, meanwhile, was an American GI who took photos of the end of the war, photos that capture its horror, preserved in a scrapbook only Anna has seen. 
 
Anna wants to believe in Christoph and the future he promises her but as their relationship becomes increasingly unsettling, she must face up to everything she has been unwilling to see, and everything Christoph has chosen to ignore. 
 
'An elegant, unsettling novel about the burden of history and the illusions of love' Sana Krasikov, author of The Patriots 
 
'Heather Clark writes with a rare empathy' Times Literary Supplement

Heather Clark

Praise for The Scrapbook

Phenomenal... Worthy of reading and rereading

An ambitious, stirring debut

Clark, in prose at the same time richly philosophical and light of touch, accomplishes a double feat. She has written both an aching love story and an incisive examination of the politics of memory

Phenomenal... Worthy of reading and rereading

An ambitious, stirring debut

Clark, in prose at the same time richly philosophical and light of touch, accomplishes a double feat. She has written both an aching love story and an incisive examination of the politics of memory

Phenomenal... Worthy of reading and rereading

An ambitious, stirring debut

Clark, in prose at the same time richly philosophical and light of touch, accomplishes a double feat. She has written both an aching love story and an incisive examination of the politics of memory

Books by Heather Clark

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