Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted by Andrew Wilson

(Scribner, $30)

Welcome again to “the gossipiest, most divisive, and arguably most compelling literary legend of them all,” said Emma Garman in Salon.com. Exactly 50 years after Sylvia Plath committed suicide, “an ongoing conflict of biblical fervor” still rages over what drove the 30-year-old poet to take her life. While Plath devotees place the blame on her husband, English poet Ted Hughes—a controlling womanizer who had recently left Plath for another woman—the “equally intransigent” other side points to Plath’s tortured psyche. Andrew Wilson, whose book takes its title from a Plath poem, leans toward the latter camp. Drawing on archives, exhaustive interviews, and his subject’s own writings, Wilson “persuasively” argues that Plath was on a course toward potential self-destruction long before she knew Hughes.

The young Plath, in Wilson’s careful portrait, is both spirited and deeply troubled, said Julia M. Klein in The Boston Globe. Wilson avoids definitive labels, but seems to believe that Plath might have suffered from borderline personality disorder. She wrote poetry about self-harm, “struggled to contain a powerful sex drive” during a repressive era, and first attempted suicide at 20. Even while establishing herself as a poetry prodigy, Plath dated hundreds of men before she met Hughes in her mid-20s. Indeed, Wilson interviewed “an astonishing number of them,” making this book perhaps “the definitive account of Plath’s early years.”

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It suffers some tedious patches, said Eric G. Wilson in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Plath’s love life was far from dull, but we don’t need detailed accounts of every schoolgirl crush. Wilson compensates by providing “riveting scenes” of Plath’s childhood, including the writer’s memories of her disciplinarian father. Plath eventually found a degree of escape from early trauma and various financial pressures by “turning her life into accomplished autobiographical fiction,” culminating in her 1963 novel, The Bell Jar. “She often performed more than lived,” but Wilson’s valuable study brings us closer to truly knowing her.