CARL ROLLYSON

On the fiftieth anniversary of her death, a startling new vision of Plath--the first to draw from the recently-opened Ted Hughes archiveThe life and work of Sylvia Plath has taken on the proportions of myth. Educated at Smith, she had an epically conflict-filled relationship with her mother, Aurelia. She then married the poet Ted Hughes and plunged into the sturm and drang of married life in the full glare of the world of English and American letters. Her poems were fought over, rejected, accepted and, ultimately, embraced by readers everywhere. Dead at thirty, she committed suicide by putting her head in an oven while her children slept. Her poetry collection titled "Ariel" became a modern classic. Her novel "The Bell Jar" has a fixed place on student reading lists. "American Isis" will be the first Plath bio benefitting from the new Ted Hughes archive at the British Library which includes forty one letters between Plath and Hughes as well as a host of unpublished papers. The Sylvia Plath Carl Rollyson brings to us in "American Isis" is no shrinking Violet overshadowed by Ted Hughes, she is a modern day Isis, a powerful force that embraced high and low culture to establish herself in the literary firmament.

La irrupción de Susan Sotang en el mundo de las letras, a mediados de la década de los sesenta, marcó el inicio de un tiempo nuevo y lleno de sorpresas. No sólo era dueña de una voz muy cualificada, sino que ademas desdeñaba los limites entre la alta cultura y los fenomenos de masas: para ella el analisi de lo cmap resultaba tan digno de atencion como la mas profunda polemica literaria, y mientras sus escritos se publicaban en selectas revistas de critica, su atrativa imagen recorria las paginas de Vogue.