Rough magic sylvia plath

During 2006 and 2008 I was overcome with desire to revisit the life of Sylvia Plath, the American poet who killed herself in England in 1963 at the age of 32. She left a manuscript of the collection of poems called Ariel (and two tiny children). That was the beginning of her legacy and cult status. The irony was that her estranged husband, Ted Hughes, later poet laureate of England, became inextricably tied to her mother in overseeing the publication and restrictive use of her work. For the rest of his life, Ted was tied to Sylvia,and his last work was the collected poems of " Birthday Letters" a transparent effort to explain his life with Sylvia. The public always blamed him for her death.His mistress, Assia Wevill, killed herself and their baby in 1968 by gas. (Read Lover of Unreason)

Rough Magic is a superb and comprehensive story of her life--the brilliance, the education at Wellesly and Oxford, the mental illness and suicide attempts--but mostly it is about the making of a poet finally worn down by the travails of marriage, parenthood, jealousy,mental illness, the betrayal of her husband and a particularly cold winter in London, 1962. The book adheres to what has become the myth of Plath. Ariel shows she was a great

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