![]() ![]() ![]() 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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