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    American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath
    American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath
    American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath
    Audiobook10 hours

    American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath

    Written by Carl Rollyson

    Narrated by George Newbern

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    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 und 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 benefiting 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Hughes archive at the British Library which includes forty-one letters between Plath and Hughes as well as a host of unpublished papers.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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateFeb 25, 2013
    ISBN9781452681856
    Author

    Carl Rollyson

    Carl Rollyson is professor emeritus of journalism at Baruch College, CUNY. He is author of many biographies, including Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volumes 1 & 2; William Faulkner Day by Day; The Last Days of Sylvia Plath; A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan; Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews; and Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, Revised and Updated. He is also coauthor (with Lisa Paddock) of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated. His reviews of biographies have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New Criterion. He also writes a weekly column on biography for the New York Sun.

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    Reviews for American Isis

    3.5/5

    25 ratings5 reviews

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    • 2/5
      I feel bad about piling on here, especially since I received it through the First Reads program and never like giving a low review to those books (even though I'm always honest and will do it if necessary), but...

      ...this was terrible. Honestly. It's inaccessible for readers who aren't already Plath enthusiasts. For those of us who are, there's nothing new to learn from it, other than that Rollyson badly needs an editor. The book is mainly just a regurgitation of the better Plath bios already out there, with a slew of awkward comparisons to Marilyn Monroe mixed in for good measure (really, what's with that?). It struck me as an exercise by a self-indulgent writer and not a serious stab at giving new historical insight on an important figure.

      If you don't already know a good bit about Plath, I would avoid it entirely, as Rollyson doesn't give good context or background information. If you are a Plath fan, you can find so much better out there. Skip it.
    • 5/5
      When I was in school around 1970, we were told that Sylvia Plath committed suicide because her husband, poet Ted Hughes, was an arrogant egotist who used her as a typist and suppressed her creativity and that it was his infidelity that finally drove her to suicide; it was the feminist stand at the time. This new biography, which draws on sources that were unavailable until after Ted Hughes death, shows a very different and far more complex story. Plath was not a woman forced into the shadows; if she was ever in the shadows, she put herself there. Plath based her life on an idealized image in her head, an image that not only had her cast as an over achieving writer but as perfect wife and mother-even, at age 20, making a suicide attempt when her academic career was not going as she planned. She suffered from (and was treated multiple times for) depression and yet found the energy to take care of a home and children, write as much as Hughes did, and type his work. She was a driven woman, fighting to stay on top of everything including her demons. And she was fragile. That Hughes’ infidelity finally drove her over the edge is probably true, but Hughes was not the monster he’s been made out to be. Nor was Plath the vicious madwoman that Hughes’ sister, Olwyn, has described.Rollyson drew largely on the Ted Hughes archive at the British Library, which includes many letters between Plath and Hughes and other unpublished papers and on interviews with friends of Plath and Hughes, which has enabled a balanced picture of Plath to emerge from the dust. It’s easily readable and as gripping as any novel. The book is a great addition to the Plath biographies.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      When I was in school around 1970, we were told that Sylvia Plath committed suicide because her husband, poet Ted Hughes, was an arrogant egotist who used her as a typist and suppressed her creativity and that it was his infidelity that finally drove her to suicide; it was the feminist stand at the time. This new biography, which draws on sources that were unavailable until after Ted Hughes death, shows a very different and far more complex story. Plath was not a woman forced into the shadows; if she was ever in the shadows, she put herself there. Plath based her life on an idealized image in her head, an image that not only had her cast as an over achieving writer but as perfect wife and mother-even, at age 20, making a suicide attempt when her academic career was not going as she planned. She suffered from (and was treated multiple times for) depression and yet found the energy to take care of a home and children, write as much as Hughes did, and type his work. She was a driven woman, fighting to stay on top of everything including her demons. And she was fragile. That Hughes’ infidelity finally drove her over the edge is probably true, but Hughes was not the monster he’s been made out to be. Nor was Plath the vicious madwoman that Hughes’ sister, Olwyn, has described.Rollyson drew largely on the Ted Hughes archive at the British Library, which includes many letters between Plath and Hughes and other unpublished papers and on interviews with friends of Plath and Hughes, which has enabled a balanced picture of Plath to emerge from the dust. It’s easily readable and as gripping as any novel. The book is a great addition to the Plath biographies.
    • 5/5
      The role of a biography is to narrate a story. And as a storyteller, the biographer reveals who the subject is to him/her. This is part of the biographer's agenda; and every biography has one. In American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath, Carl Rollyson tells the story of who Sylvia Plath is to him, and he does so in a narrative style that is easy to read without being either stuffy or pretentious or essentially a bullet-pointed list of Plath's life. Rollyson is keenly aware of mid-century American society and popular culture. This awareness infuses who his Sylvia Plath was as a person who was--the same way we are today--influenced by that which surrounded her. As such, Rollyson expertly contextualizes some of the many aspects of life that directly impacted Sylvia Plath. To some that study Plath, this is very beneficial information because in turn it helps to understand her creative writing: the process by which she absorbed exterior stimuli and reprocessed it in her art.The first full-length, full-life biography of Plath in more than 20 years (not counting re-issues), American Isis makes use of newly available archival information and interviews with people who have never spoken before on their relationship with Plath. Through interviews with Plath's former housemates and fellow students, Rollyson masterfully sets the scene, for example, of Smith College in the 1950s in a way that adds contextually to what Plath writes about in her published journals and letters. Rollyson shines brightest in American Isis in the last chapter, which explores Plath's posthumous career. His examination of the Plath Estate is exemplary; highlighting its mismanagement and the conflict of interest in the choice of executors, among other things. The book closes with four valuable appendices on Plath and Carl Jung, David Wevill, Elizabeth Sigmund, and passages Plath underlined, starred or annotated in books from her personal library.A perfect biography of Plath isn't possible, and frankly I am not sure that I want one. It would mean no more mystery and possibly no reason to further investigate her life and her art.