Just a short review because I wasn't planning on reviewing the book and secondly it was a "for fun" read.

I didn't know much about Plath except from reading The Bell Jar and knowing she took her own life. I didn't even know she was a poet; I have since bought a collection of her poetry. I was after some basic background on the author that everyone seems to know. I got much more than that from American Isis. My initial thoughts were this woman is brilliant and crazy. Why doesn't anyone see the last part? It is pretty obvious. The more I read, the more I started seeing the traits a close friend of mine shared with Plath. My friend took her own life six years ago. The reading was quite eerie and at points had me thinking back.

Since most of the source material came from those close to her and her own writing, it may have been hard for people close to her to see. I am sure that some people must have thought -- "It's Sylvia just being Sylvia." It's only later that we see it is something more.

The book was a good insight to Plath's life. I know much more about her life and what she went through. It was an enlightening read. ( )

Let me get my quibbles out of the way first, because I want to focus on the strengths of this biography.

I disagree strongly with Rollyson's decision to refer to Plath by what were apparently childhood nicknames early on in this biography. Throughout the book, he quietly switches between "Sylvia," "Sylvia Plath," and "Plath," which is fine. And in the first paragraph of the first chapter, there's nothing wrong with his saying that "Sylvia Plath liked to tell the story of her mother setting her infant Sivvy on the beach to see what she would do." But it's unnerving to read the end of a paragraph that compares the young Sylvia Plath to Coriolanus, and then have the next paragraph open, "Siv was six years old when war came to Europe." And the very *next* paragraph begins, "Syl was not alone." At this point, I honestly couldn't tell if we were being told that Plath had a lot of childhood nicknames, or if Rollyson was amusing himself by coming up with every possible nickname for "Sylvia."

Which leads me to a larger weakness of this work. For whatever reason, Rollyson often adopts a tone that is conversational to the point of being slangy. The problem with using current phraseology in a work like this is that it makes your book sound out of date about twenty minutes after it's published.

Rollyson wisely chose to work independently rather than writing an "authorized" biography. Anyone familiar with the thorny history of Plath biographies will understand and sympathize with this decision. It does mean that Rollyson needs to paraphrase a great deal rather than quote directly from letters, diary entries, and poems, which is a lot of work. But that makes it all the more important not to seem to be trying to compete with Plath's own writing and tone, and to aim instead for a certain invisibility as a biographer. I'm not sure that Plath would agree that "A day off from babysitting felt like the lid on her life was blown off."

I'm also old-school enough to believe that italics and exclamation points should be kept to a bare minimum in any book, and in a biography they should be limited to direct quotes. But here is Rollyson, describing the summer Plath lightly fictionalized in "The Bell Jar":

"She would sit, book in hand, but could not read. *Sylvia Plath could not read!*"

Rollyson also insists that the reason Plath wasn't accepted into Frank O'Connor's Harvard writing course was that O'Connor "thought Sylvia too advanced for his class. Given that this rejection was a trigger for her suicide attempt, any information concerning how and why it happened is of vital interest. But Rollyson doesn't give a source for this idea. He also refers to Frank O'Connor as O'Connor, O'Conner, and O'Hara, and mentions Plath "pouring over" an experience. This was all in the first fifty pages. I almost closed the book.

But I'm glad I kept going. Rollyson's writing smooths out after this, and his biography is sympathetic, thoughtful, and fresh.

Rollyson is aware that many (if not most) of his readers will be very familiar with Plath's life already. So, as he puts it:

"I have dispensed with a good deal of the boilerplate most biographers feel compelled to supply. I say little, for example, about the backgrounds of Plath's parents. I don't describe much of Smith College or its history. I do very little scene setting."

If you're not already familiar with Plath's story and work, this is not the biography to start with. If you're a longtime admirer, this is a fast, absorbing read. ( )

How many biographies have been written about Sylvia Plath? And how many will I read? Apparently the answer is all of them since the real person behind the poems continues to be elusive thanks to the obstacles set up for biographers by the Hughes family who have been the caretakers of her literary estate for the past 60 years.

Biographers are either in Camp Ted or Camp Sylvia and author Carl Rollyson is definitely in Camp Sylvia, but in a more balanced way than some of Plath's more strident feminist acolytes.

The portrait painted here is of a young woman who felt abandoned by her father's death when she was ten years old and also grateful, yet suffocated by her mother's self-sacrificing for her children. Clearly brilliant and ambitious, Plath started stacking up awards and recognition at an early age, only to succumb to a mental breakdown after being named as a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine in 1953 which would become the material for her novel The Bell Jar currently celebrating it's 50th year of publication.

After treatment, Plath returned to Smith College where she graduates summa cum laude and won a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge University in 1955. There she meets Ted Hughes an up & coming poet who she marries in 1956.

The fact that these two should never have married become eminently clear. Plath is drawn to Hughes as a protecting father figure as well as a brilliant poet (who was later named Poet Laureate in Britain) and Hughes was drawn to Plath for both her American glamor and her extreme intelligence. However, Hughes finds it hard to deal with Plath's mercurial moods and also feels threatened by her talent and ambition. Once two children arrive in fairly quick succession, his eye starts to roam. In July, 1962 Plath answers the phone & finds it's his lover at the other end - a woman they both know socially - and the marriage is over. Seven moths later, Plath will kill herself.

It's hard not to blame Ted Hughes, at least in part, for the disastrous outcome of the marriage, but the real villain in the piece is his sister Olwyn who appears to have an almost pathological attachment to her brother & who even now, 50 years later (based on an interview with The Guardian in January, 2013) is full of vitriol towards Plath. Ironically, she was named in Ted Hughes' will as the literary executor of all of Plath's writings.

The last chapter in this book, which takes place after Plath's suicide and deals with the various machinations of Ted Hughes and his sister to control both Plath's literary legacy and the story of the last years of her life, is thoe most interessting part of the book. Olwyn Hughes continues this efforts to this very day. In fact, I had to look her up after I finished this book since I could not believe that as biography with such an unflattering portrait of the woman could be published if she were still alive. Maybe once she's dead, the real story can be told. For now, I'm afraid we all just have to pick sides. ( )