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American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath, by Carl Rollyson
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On the fiftieth anniversary of her death, a startling new vision of Plath―the first to draw from the recently-opened Ted Hughes archive
The life and work of Sylvia Plath has taken on the proportions of myth. Educated at Smith, she had an epically conflict-filled relationship with her mother, Aurelia. She then married the poet Ted Hughes and plunged into the sturm and drang of married life in the full glare of the world of English and American letters. Her poems were fought over, rejected, accepted and, ultimately, embraced by readers everywhere. Dead at thirty, she committed suicide by putting her head in an oven while her children slept.
Her poetry collection titled Ariel became a modern classic. Her novel The Bell Jar has a fixed place on student reading lists. American Isis will be the first Plath bio benefitting from the new Ted Hughes archive at the British Library which includes forty one letters between Plath and Hughes as well as a host of unpublished papers. The Sylvia Plath Carl Rollyson brings to us in American Isis is no shrinking Violet overshadowed by Ted Hughes, she is a modern day Isis, a powerful force that embraced high and low culture to establish herself in the literary firmament.
- Sales Rank: #917826 in Books
- Published on: 2013-01-29
- Released on: 2013-01-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.57" h x 1.25" w x 6.46" l, 1.19 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 336 pages
From Booklist
*Starred Review* In spite of all that has been written about Sylvia Plath’s incendiary poetry, her doomed marriage to poet Ted Hughes, her suicide, and the vicious struggle over her literary estate, accomplished biographer Rollyson presents a fresh, focused, and clarifying interpretation of her “protean personality” and radical work. He kicks things off with a jolt: “Sylvia Plath is the Marilyn Monroe of modern literature.” On his way to substantiating this bold assertion, Rollyson draws on newly available materials, retrieves overlooked aspects of Plath’s life, decodes her fascination with the great deity Isis, and recognizes her intense, ultimately unsustainable ambition to be a paramount force. We see Plath as a high-IQ girl shattered by her father’s death, preternaturally close to her mother, and precociously devoted to writing and winning prizes. Rollyson offers intriguing insights into Plath’s ardor for popular culture, including such melodramatic fiction as Stella Dallas, by Olive Higgins Prouty, who became a mentor as Plath struggled to write both poetry and potboilers. In his true-life page-turner, Rollyson astutely deciphers Plath’s complicated love life and attempt to retain emotional distance, ex-pat life in England, jump-starting of Hughes’ career while relentlessly pursuing her own, and catastrophic depression. Rollyson unveils brilliant, driven, spotlight-craving Plath as an exceptional, trailblazing artist who pushed herself to be a goddess until she could do no more. --Donna Seaman
Review
"The figure that emerges from Rollyson's study is certainly compelling, and very much a woman of her moment and culture." ---Publishers Weekly
From the Author
The edition corrects some errors in the ebook and hardcover editions.
Most helpful customer reviews
26 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
Very problematic biography
By R. Murphy
I was really looking forward to this book. I've read a lot of Sylvia Plath biographies in the past and I was excited to learn what the information obtained from the Ted Hughes archive would add to the view of this very compelling woman.
Well, the information is very promising, but I think I'm going to have to wait for a writer other than Rollyson to write about Plath in order to get a thorough portrait. It's painfully clear from the opening chapter that Rollyson isn't interested in presenting a humanizing and accurate portrait of Sylvia Plath, but wants to simply add to the fetishization of Plath's legacy. His prose is overblown and breathy, and after a rather off-putting introduction where he declares his intentions to avoid the standard "boilerplate" of most Plath biographies (which, in all honesty, is only boilerplate if he decided not to do his own research and obtain fresh insights) and write a book for the "Plath experts" rather than novices, he mostly indulges in scattered anecdotes. Most obnoxiously, particularly when dealing with a subject who was famous for rewriting her own history, he will often present the anecdote as Plath often gave it, then after a completely straightforward retelling will then explain the truth behind it. This is extremely frustrating because I would then have to go back and reread the Plath version to compare the two, since Rollyson would then fail to give any analysis on the changes beyond another sycophantic murmuring of how those changes were simply another indicator of Plath's brilliance in crafting a public persona as a "Primordial Child of Time" (what was horrifying was Rollyson's utter lack of irony in terms like this and how steadily he beat to death his own introduction of the Isis terminology).
While some areas are zipped through, others that interest him are giving exhaustive analysis, such as Plath's Marilyn Monroe dream that Rollyson over-analyzes in excruciating detail. The whole topic of Marilyn Monroe is bizarrely overblown, but others have already commented on how Rollyson is a victim of his own overglorification of biographical subjects and can't resist bringing in an individual that he himself already wrote a biography about, even though there is no real connection between these two women. I'm not even going to start about how obnoxious it is to see Rollyson skip between about five different nicknames for Sylvia Plath within the same chapter (Siv, Sivvy, Syl, and Sylvia are all used between pages 8 and 9) - he needed to just calm down and stop trying to establish a sense of false intimacy with his subject.
After a bizarre first few chapters that his editor should've frankly made him rewrite, Rollyson finally settles down and shows some good biographical efforts around the time of the Hughes-Plath marriage - which I don't think is a coincidence that this is where his access to the Hughes archives allowed him to do very fresh research. Honestly, if Rollyson had just wanted to focus on this era of Plath's life, he should've just done that rather than have such a problematic first half of the book.
38 of 44 people found the following review helpful.
Informative Book Weakened By Chilly, Patronizing Viewpoint
By Reader from Washington, DC
I award this book a "5" for research and a "2" for its tone and approach, which works out to a "3."
This biography of poet Sylvia Plath has some interesting pieces of new information, based on the author's research in archives and interviews with some of the people who knew her. The author clearly did a ton of work.
The author also takes clear and informative positions on the many unresolved questions about Plath's life and work and the way her husband handled her literary estate after her suicide. Since these questions have split scholars and fans of Plath and her estranged husband, poet Ted Hughes, into opposing sides for decades, the author's candor about certain disputes was refreshing and welcome.
However, the tone of the book is very cold. The author treats Plath, Hughes and many others connected with them in a manner that I perceived as condescending.
Newcomers to Plath biographies will be bewildered by the author's brief, cryptic references to incidents that are well-known to people who have read other Plath biographies and materials where these incidents are described in detail. This makes the biography more useful to scholarly insiders than the average reader.
The author did this deliberately, basically stating that he is not writing for the "Plath novice" but for "the knowledgeable Plath reader." This approach seems very patronizing to me. I am a "knowledgeable Plath reader" -- I've read a great deal about her -- but I am baffled as to why the author would ignore potential book purchasers who are new to Plath's work and life.
The author has a good understanding of the 1950s American culture from which Plath emerged, which strengthens the book, but his repeated attempts to compare Plath's life and problems with those of 1950s movie actress Marilyn Monroe are -- at least in my opinion -- not really accurate.
The book's author wrote a Marilyn Monroe biography, but as Plath and Monroe had no personal or professional connections of any kind and worked in different fields, the comparison feels very forced. I'm not sure why the author didn't try comparing Plath to some of her talented and troubled 1950s American poet contemporaries -- Anne Sexton comes to mind -- where they were personally acquainted or shared friends in common.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
DIDACTIC AND SLOPPY
By Charlotte Vale-Allen
This is a hugely pretentious piece of work, with so many typos that I have to wonder if it went through a copy-editing process at all. As well, there are errors that leave me scratching my head in disbelief. The biggest gaffe is a reference to Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca and its famous first line: "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley ... " Yeah, well not according to Mr. Rollyson who has written: "Last night I dreamed I went to Mandalay again." Okay, so he dreamed he went to Burma, which kind of illustrates his rather scattershot biographical effort here. This book is achingly tedious with an insistently ongoing----horribly failing----pretentious attempt to link Sylvia Plath to Marilyn Monroe. Huh? Uhm no. It doesn't work and it's just embarrassing. None of the people in American Isis comes to life ... until the last little bit when the loathsome (mentally ill?) Olwyn Hughes takes center stage. The descriptions of her ongoing efforts to distort and discredit Plath's legacy, particularly her marriage to Olwyn's brother, the thuggish Ted Hughes, are remarkable. This little clutch of pages demonstrates that author Rollyson actually has writing ability. It's just a pity that Olwyn Hughes wasn't the subject of this biography. Then we'd have had an intriguingly meaty book to read. As it stands, we got stuck with the gristle.
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