A poetic legend in the making

Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted
by Andrew Wilson
(Simon & Schuster, £20)

“How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?” Sylvia Plath wrote in her journal. It is now 50 years since she laid her head in the oven of her flat in Primrose Hill, and we are still sorting through the versions of herself that Plath left behind. Who is Sylvia?

There is the dutiful daughter cheerfully reporting on her successes to “mommy” in Letters Home, the suicidal Esther, heroine of her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar; the loving mother of poems such as Morning Song (“Love set you going like a fat gold watch…”), the selfish mother of Edge (“each dead child coiled, a white serpent…”). Add to these the conflicting biographical portraits in which she variously appears as a monster, a victim, a feminist heroine, a brilliant poet, a not-quite-good-enough poet, a strong woman who killed herself, a weak woman who killed herself, and now, in a biographical prequel to the main event of her life, Andrew Wilson has given us a portrait of Sylvia before she met her “colossus”, Ted Hughes.

How interesting is Sylvia without Ted? The answer is no more so than any other all-American competitive college girl in a hurry to lose her virginity and become famous. Like most teenagers, Plath saw herself as highly unusual but what comes across in these pages — aside from the astonishing number of boyfriends she managed to notch up — is the sheer ordinariness of her story once the myth of her marriage has been removed. What distinguished Plath from the crowd was the force of her writing, but because Wilson has evidently not been granted permission to quote, he has had to give us Plath without the poems, which returns her to the position of what Janet Malcolm, in her brilliant account of the Plath industry, called “The Silent Woman”.

This is a shame, but Wilson, who has read through mountains of Plath’s letters and journals, does a good job of paraphrasing and manages to deflect the focus of the biography from Plath’s own consciousness to the way in which she was perceived by the various friends and lovers he has interviewed. What emerges is a forensically detailed account of her various anxieties: how could she ever be both a wife and a writer? How could she ever be good enough to justify her widowed mother’s sacrifices? And, most importantly, how could she experience sexual pleasure without getting pregnant?

By revealing how far Sylvia allowed each of her boyfriends to go and how much money she earned from each of her summer jobs, Wilson will satisfy the craving for detail of even the most obsessive of Plath’s fans. When the book ends, Sylvia has been dumped in Paris by her current boyfriend and is about to rebound into a relationship with a “big dark hunky boy” called Ted Hughes.

We leave her aged 23, still very much the anxious child, driving at 100 miles an hour into the story we all know so well.

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