Bitter Fame - A Life of Sylvia Plath

Penguin Books1998. May have very faded spine, wear to cover extremities.

A sobering and salutary attempt to estimate what Plath was, what she achieved and what it cost her... Earlier accounts gave us the Red Riding Hood in Plath, Stevenson gives us the wolf as well. This is the only portrait which answers Ted Hughes's image of the poet as Ariel, not the ethereal bright pure roving sprite, but Ariel trapped in Prospero's pine and raging to be free...