Any reader of “ The Bell Jar” is aware of the horrors of electroconvulsive therapy, but the revelation that Plath received four ECT treatments without anesthesia before her 1953 suicide attempt is devastating. Where Clark treads familiar ground, she amplifies what we already know in compelling and painful ways. He would only repay that debt after her death.

Though Hughes did help Plath with brainstorming and childcare in a way that was unusual for the time, he did not promote her work for publication. Hughes called his new bride his “secretary in chief,” and indeed it was Plath who submitted the manuscript for “The Hawk in the Rain,” the book that would launch Hughes’ career. Details of family history, including her grandmother’s institutionalization for depression and the FBI’s investigation of her German father, appear for the first time here. Clark is the first biographer able to scan pages from the archive rather than take “hastily scribbled” notes on site, and it shows. Anticipating interest in her letters, she kept a diary from a very young age and dated all correspondence and drafts with confidence in her legacy. The result is Clark’s defining project, both a joyful affirmation for Plath fanatics and a legitimization of her legacy. Now, after nearly half a century, new information has emerged, old grudges been buried.

Books on Plath fell into two camps: the personal - even sensational - and the academic. The literary estate’s iron fist in doling out permissions hasn’t helped. The melodrama of her life and its horrific conclusion overwhelms the fact that above all, Plath was a poet. It’s exactly this transference that makes a Plath biography challenging. With Heather Clark’s new biography, “ Red Comet,” clocking in at more than 1,100 pages, the Plath cup runneth over. From the moment of her death in 1963, her life and work have been transcribed onto many narratives, including but not limited to ambition, motherhood, the American dream, anti-Semitism, postwar poetry, mental illness and, most powerfully, feminism. Sylvia Plath long ago reached, even overshot, iconic status.

If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores. Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

Heather clark red comet