In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, multi-award winning biographer, literary critic and novelist, Dr Heather Clark chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. In Red Comet, Heather Clark portrays the full scope of Plath’s vibrant life and enduring art.
Finalist: The Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the LA Times Book Prize in Biography
Winner: Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism
Winner: Slightly Foxed Prize for Best First Biography
Red Comet
Red Comet portrays Sylvia Plath’s fierce creative drive, her remarkable literary achievements, and her role in a mid-twentieth-century literary culture. This biography shifts the focus away from Plath’s death and instead portrays the author as an exceptionally talented, ambitious young woman navigating her time and circumstances. Crucially, Heather Clark resists the impulse to reduce Plath’s life to a mere prelude to tragedy.
Sylvia Plath 1949
Red Comet offers a more expansive and compassionate portrait of Plath than previous accounts. Heather Clark shows that Plath’s life was filled with moments of joy, artistic exhilaration and personal courage. Through this nuanced lens, Sylvia Plath emerges as a complex, brilliant individual with a vibrant life. By repositioning Plath among the most important American writers of the twentieth century, Red Comet invites us to appreciate Plath’s genius and legacy rather than traditional one-dimensional accounts of her life.
The Making of Red Comet
How did Heather Clark manage to paint such a comprehensive, vibrant picture of a figure as scrutinised as Sylvia Plath? The answer lies in years of meticulous research and a dedication to uncovering new material. Heather devoted eight years to researching and writing Red Comet, diving deep into Plath’s world. She combed through a wealth of sources, from previously unseen letters and diaries to newly released records and interviews, to ensure no page was left unturned.
Challenging the Popular Myths About Sylvia Plath
Notably, Heather gained access to a newly opened archive of Plath’s papers at Emory University, which had been collected by a previous biographer, Harriet Rosenstein. She was one of the first scholars to explore boxes of Sylvia’s materials that had been hidden for decades. This trove of new information yielded fresh insights and corrected many misconceptions, enabling Heather to incorporate all of Plath’s surviving letters and a fuller picture of her family history for the first time in a Plath biography.
Sylvia Plath 1956
Managing the avalanche of archival material was no small feat. Heather organised mountains of notes, letters, poems and journal entries to discern the narrative of Plath’s life. The result of this effort is an unusually comprehensive biography. At over 1,000 pages, Red Comet is sweeping in scope yet exquisitely detailed. Vitally, Heather’s research illuminates aspects of Sylvia’s life that previous biographers missed. It also enables her to dispel persistent myths about Sylvia.
Retracing Sylvia Plath’s Footsteps
Bringing Sylvia Plath’s Story to Life
While Red Comet is a serious work of scholarship, it’s also captivating. Heather balanced meticulous fact-gathering with the art of storytelling. Despite its scholarly depth, Red Comet has the propulsive narrative energy of a novel. The biography immerses us in Plath’s world: scenes are rendered with such vivid sensory detail and immediacy that readers feel as if they are with Sylvia, seeing what she saw and feeling what she felt.
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath 1956, Yorkshire
Heather also carefully balances her own authorial voice with Sylvia’s voice. By weaving in extensive excerpts from Plath’s journals and letters, Heather allows Sylvia to speak for herself throughout the narrative. The empathy she has for her subject shines through on every page. She writes about Sylvia’s emotional highs and lows with compassion and honesty, never resorting to sensationalism. As a result, Red Comet never loses its human touch or its narrative drive, even as it explores complex literary analysis and historical context. The engaging and empathetic storytelling enables readers to connect with Sylvia Plath not just as a legendary poet, but as a real young woman with dreams, fears and an indomitable spirit.
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath on their honeymoon, 1956
In reflecting on Red Comet, one can’t help but be struck by the depth and generosity of Heather Clark’s portrayal of Sylvia Plath. Her immense dedication resulted in an authentic and authoritative portrayal of Plath that isn’t shrouded in myth or defined solely by her end. Instead, Plath is remembered as a passionate, talented artist and woman. Heather Clark’s work exemplifies biography at its best, combining rigorous research with a warm, compelling narrative that invites readers into the Plath’s world.
A Snapshot of Praise for Red Comet
‘Mesmerising . . . Comprehensive . . . Stuffed with heretofore untold anecdotes that illuminate or extend our understanding of Plath’s life . . . Clark is a felicitous writer and a discerning critic of Plath’s poetry . . . There is no denying the book’s intellectual power and, just as important, its sheer readability.’
—The New York Times
‘A majestic tome with the narrative propulsion of a thriller. We now have the complete story.’
—O, The Oprah Magazine
‘An exhaustively researched, frequently brilliant masterwork. It is an impressive achievement representing a prizeworthy contribution to literary scholarship and biographical journalism.’
—The Washington Post
‘Clark masterfully analyses the poetry with intelligent incorporation of the biography. . . Red Comet shows that the achievement of Sylvia Plath was miraculous—but it wasn’t spasmodic, or rare. It was hard-won, every single day.’
—Los Angeles Times
‘Massive, insightful . . . Red Comet is a critical examination of what it means to be a female artist, to suffer from depression, and to be alone, as it is revelatory about this one particular life and the art that came from it. The red comet (an image from her poem ‘Stings’) is an apt metaphor for Plath.’
—Boston Globe
‘Revelatory. . . Plath’s struggles with depression and her marriage to Ted Hughes emerge in complex detail, but Clark does not let Plath’s suicide define her artistic achievement, arguing with refreshing rigour for her significance to modern letters. The result is a new understanding and appreciation of an innovative, uncompromising poetic voice.’
—The New Yorker
‘A definitive biography. . . What ultimately bursts off the page is Plath’s short, vibrant life, which is too often most remembered for the way it ended: “That’s the irony, isn’t it?” says Clark. ‘She’s so incredibly alive.’”
—Entertainment Weekly
‘Surely the final, the definitive, biography of Sylvia Plath . . . Takes its time in desensationalising the life and the art; this lets Clark place both firmly in the literary and politically engaged contexts that formed them and simultaneously demonstrate how Plath’s work, in return, gifted the writing life unimaginable new sinew.’
—The Guardian (‘The Best Books of 2020’)
‘Red Comet is a mighty achievement. Clark is compassionate, clear-eyed, sceptical. Each chapter reads with the ease of a novel. Plath’s resilience, genius and insight blaze through the book.’
—The Times (UK)
‘Clark entices us with the impossible: an “unbiased”, authorised biography of Sylvia Plath. Red Comet is the kind of serious literary biography Plath has long deserved but, until now, not received.’
—New Statesman (UK)
A Snapshot of Conversations about Red Comet
Leon Levy Center for Biography (CUNY Graduate Center): Heather Clark on Sylvia Plath, with Ruth Franklin.
Harvard Bookstore: Heather Clark presents Red Comet with Maggie Doherty
WNYC’s All Of It: Full Bio series on Sylvia Plath, Part 1. Researching Sylvia Plath’s Life and Early Years
Writing It! Podcast: When your editor tells you they want a doorstopper (Part One)
Great Podversations: Heather Clark and Daphne Merkin
Emory University Rose Library “Community Conversations: A Conversation with Heather Clark and David Trinidad
American Writers Museum – Nation of Writers Podcast: ‘Sylvia Plath.’
‘Working’ Slate Podcasts: Heather Clark on her Sylvia Plath biography Red Comet.
‘Working’ Slate Podcasts Biographer Heather Clark on Giving Sylvia Plath Her Due
Dr Heather Clark is a biographer, literary critic and novelist. Her recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars fellowship, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellowship, and a Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowship at the City University of New York.
She is the author of The Scrapbook; Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath; The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes; The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962–1972; and Sylvia Plath: A Very Short Introduction.
Red Comet was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the LA Times Book Prize in Biography, and was one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021. Red Comet was also a “Book of the Year” in The Guardian, The Times (London), The Daily Telegraph, The Boston Globe, Lit Hub, The Times of India, Trouw (Netherlands), and elsewhere, and has been translated into five languages.
Clark’s work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Harvard Review, Time, Air Mail, Lit Hub, Poetry, and The Times Literary Supplement. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Harvard and a doctorate in English from Oxford. She was formerly Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Huddersfield, UK. Heather lives outside New York City with her husband and two children.