![]() ![]() In the era before second-wave feminism, Lawrence’s Women in Love, with its balanced marital union, was an ideal for the Cambridge students whom Plath joined at Newnham. ![]() Clark detects the model for Plath’s vision in D H Lawrence, who imagined a sexual union as a semi-sacred transformation, unlike the casual affairs of Bloomsbury, who made friendship instead the be-all of human existence. This was a unique marriage to a fellow-poet who could tap into the lasting force of nature, and free her to gallop into “the red/ Eye, the cauldron of morning” – the fierce sun of all our days. She asked Hughes to marry her soon after their explosive meeting: a famously violent kiss, leaving tooth-marks on Ted’s cheek, at a Cambridge party in 1956. One achievement of Red Comet, Heather Clark’s terrific biography of Plath, is to document, without taking sides, her choice of Ted Hughes as a revolutionary who was true to his instincts. Plath tried to invent a way of life that would make it feasible for a woman, as well as a man, to have everything. It’s a question central to Sylvia Plath, a poet who meant to resolve this choice, at its toughest for a gifted woman growing up in Eisenhower’s ultra-conformist America of the 1950s. “Perfection of the life or of the work”: Yeats posed this dilemma. ![]()
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