THE LAST DAYS OF SYLVIA PLATH

The new book will not be a full biography of Plath, but a concise narrative focusing on the last months of her life.

In her last months, Sylvia Plath struggled to break out from the control of the towering figure of her husband Ted Hughes. In the antique mythology of his retinue, she had become the gorgon threatening to bring down the House of Hughes. Drawing on recently available court records, archives, and interviews, and reevaluating the memoirs of the formidable Hughes contingent who treated Plath as a female hysteric, Carl Rollyson rehabilitates the image of a woman too often viewed solely within the confines of what Hughes and his collaborators wanted to be written.

Rollyson is the first biographer to gain access to the papers of Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse, a key figure in the poet's final days. Barnhouse was Plath's therapist, and may have been the only person to whom Plath revealed her whole self. Barnhouse served more as Plath's ally, seeking a way out of the imprisoning charisma of Hughes and the friends he counted on to support a regime of antipathy against her.

The Last Days of Sylvia Plath focuses on the train of events that plagued Plath's last seven months when she tried to recover her own life in the midst of Hughes's alternating threats and reassurances. In a siege-like atmosphere a tormented Plath continued to write, to reach out to friends, and care for her two children. Why Barnhouse seemed to be, in Hughes's view, his wife's undoing, and how biographers parsed the events that led to the poet's death, forms the charged and contentious story this book tells.


CARL ROLLYSON is professor emeritus of journalism at Baruch College, CUNY. He is author of a dozen biographies, including American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath and biographies of Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Norman Mailer, Rebecca West, and Susan Sontag. His reviews of biography have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New Criterion, and other major periodicals.