Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath

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Summary: Essential Reading for Plath Addicts
Review: Alexander, though he professes in his introduction attention to her work, spends most of his lackluster biography chronicling Sylvia's life - her latest boyfriend or her dizzying submissions to various publications. Based on exhaustive interviews and extensive archival research - especially from Aurelia Plath, Slyvia's mother, who asked not to be identified until she died - Rough Magic (a quote from Shakespeare) probes the events that shaped the life and determined the untimely death of this fiercely talented poetess.

Long on facts, short on criticism, in the end Rough Magic (an apt quote from Shakespeare's Tempest) is shallow (it pales in comparison to my favorite, the Pulitzer-winning Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris). The biography stands apart only in its full-bodied (includes fourteen pages of pictures), decidedly sympathetic view of this emotionally unstable artist; thus, though it tells us more than we have heard before about the marriage between Plath and England's poet laureate Ted Hughes, it does so from her side, portraying Hughes as craggy, possessed with horoscopes and the occult.

Yet because Hughes has never granted an interview about Plath and refuses all rights to quote unless he can vet the work, Alexander resorts to paraphrasing Plath's work, which inherently de-energizes his page but happily makes for an artful restraint on Alexander's part, which allows the harrowing circumstances of Plath's life to speak for themselves.

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Summary: Finally!
Review: At long last, a biography of Sylvia Plath written by someone who refused to bow to the editorial demands of Ted & Olwyn Hughes, who unfortunately controlled the late poet's estate at the time. Choosing freedom of speech over permission to quote Plath's work, Paul Alexander has produced an extraordinary biography that reveals the true Sylvia Plath as a girl, woman, wife, mother, and most important, author. With interviews from friends and family who had never before spoken about Plath for publication, this is a book that any scholar of Plath's life and work should not miss.

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Summary: A Illuminating Portal Into The Life Of A Tortured Soul
Review: I read this book for a research paper I did in high school almost five years ago and still check it out of the library every once in a while. Alexander does a tremendous job showing the reader Plath as a person and a poet, up to those last terrible days preceding her death. He goes through real conversations, focuses a lot on Assia Wevill and Ted Hughes, and holds nothing back. I recommend this book without reservation; it is a way to feel like you knew Plath, who unfortunately we will never see or hear from again.

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Summary: Rough Magic, Rough Sex
Review: Paul Alexander wrote an ambitious book about the actor James Dean in which Dean is shown to have gotten ahead on his back, and liked doing so, while indulging in a passion for rough sex with just about anyone who took his fancy. Now Sylvia Plath is shown going the same route at about the same time, and for the first time her affair with the mysterious Richard Sassoon is given center stage and explored as perhaps the central love relationship in her life, which makes for a change from other biographies which dwell on Ted Hughes' inadequacies (or conversely on why Ted was so much a better man and poet than Sylvia was a human being), or on Sylvia's fear of Otto and her love hate thing she had with Aurelia.

Paul Alexander's National Enquirer-style reporting may turn some heads, and may startle gentler souls, and in fact did we really need to hear all this about Sylvia's sexual masochism and taste for spanking? When it comes to moving to England, the book goes kind of Lucifer Rising with its deep focus on Ted's zodiac mysticism and Sylvia's picking up ghostly reverberations and getting her poetry from out of the air, like Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy cover or a leftover chapter from Cold Comfort Farm. It's great.

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Summary: One-sided, but a good read
Review: Paul Alexander's Rough Magic allows the reader to fully understand and enter the psyche of Sylvia Plath from her blissful childhood to her more tumultuous adult years. What I found was very nice about this biography was that it included Sylvia's poetry in a chronological order. It was so helpful to have her poetry included after just reading what her life was like at the immediate time that she wrote that certain piece. Also, by having her writing placed in a chronological order, I found that I could really pick up on how she developed her writing and honed her skills over time.
It is very apparent that the work gone into the making of this book was so thorough and in depth. Mr. Alexander did a fabulous job piecing Sylvia's life together in one book. It seems like every relationship Sylvia ever had has been accounted for and analyzied in this book.
I recommend this book to anyone who would like a deeper understanding of Sylvia Plath's life and her continuous descent into depression.

Rating:
Summary: Rough Magic
Review: Paul Alexander's Rough Magic allows the reader to fully understand and enter the psyche of Sylvia Plath from her blissful childhood to her more tumultuous adult years. What I found was very nice about this biography was that it included Sylvia's poetry in a chronological order. It was so helpful to have her poetry included after just reading what her life was like at the immediate time that she wrote that certain piece. Also, by having her writing placed in a chronological order, I found that I could really pick up on how she developed her writing and honed her skills over time.
It is very apparent that the work gone into the making of this book was so thorough and in depth. Mr. Alexander did a fabulous job piecing Sylvia's life together in one book. It seems like every relationship Sylvia ever had has been accounted for and analyzied in this book.
I recommend this book to anyone who would like a deeper understanding of Sylvia Plath's life and her continuous descent into depression.

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Summary: A Compassionate & Complete View of a True Artist
Review: Thank you, Paul Alexander, for a complete and compassionate view of the life of the poet, artist, mother, wife--and sunbather!--Sylvia Plath. You put her heart, mind, and poetry (and how she arrived at that poetry) first, chapter after chapter, so that the reader could feel so very close to Sylvia. I read this book with a collection of Sylvia's poetry at hand, which made the read feel especially all-inclusive, and thorough. You did such a wonderful job of pinpointing the days on which Sylvia wrote certain poems, so that it was a pleasure to follow along and read those particular poems at the 'right time'. Sylvia grew up in print--having published her first poem at eight then continuing to publish poems year by year, until (well, and after) her death.
I found so many of the details revealed in this biography fascinating (for instance, Ted's interest in the occult and hypnosis) and Sylvia's desires for "signs" when she was lost in her life. I appreciated that she felt she had received a sign from William Butler Yeats, given his own meanderings into the supernatural.
If not for this book, I would not have been touched by her life. Many thanks for the years you must have put into bringing the book--and Sylvia--into existence. I am thankful that she gave so much of herself to the world, and that you've shown us a great deal of that Self, that heady poet and that very brave woman Sylvia Plath.

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Summary: Captivating
Review: This is one of the best biographies I have read of anyone, not just Plath. The author allows you intimate access into Plath's mind, and the fine details he includes really draw you into her world. Plath, as a "character," really begins to *matter* to you in this book. I can't put it down.

Rating:
Summary: One-sided, but a good read
Review: This is the only Sylvia Plath biography I've ever read, and while the book is thorough in its exposition it is very sympathetic to Plath and Plath's mother, Aurelia. I had the feeling it was presenting the side of the story that Plath's mother wanted told with not as much attention to the other side of the story.

The Plath in "Rough Magic" is an impulsive, attractive, manic-depressive individual who is unquestionably talented. However, I felt sorry for the people she left behind in her wake as she swooped through life - the boyfriends and few female friends who were picked up and discarded easily as Plath moved from one year to the next. Plath was beautiful, smart and driven - and, I think, had been indulged by family and friends to the point that she was probably pretty hard to live with. Frankly, I feel that a lot of Plath's problems were her own creation - especially her primary problem, her marriage to Ted Hughes. She met and decided to become involved with Hughes based on a strong physical attraction and not much else, and within 4 months after getting together they were married. Her own mentor warned her about how the first excitement of love doesn't last, but Plath refused to listen. Maybe if Plath had taken more time before marrying him to find out about his bizarre relationship with his sister Olwyn, his violent temper, his womanizing, and his odd personality quirks - his refusals to bathe, his obsession with the occult, etc. she could have avoided marrying him and ending up in a bad situation. It is not a great idea to marry someone you know little about other than that you have sexual chemistry. Same thing with deciding to have children - she was desperate to have children and had two in short order, meanwhile criticizing childless women, and yet seemed to despair when she realized the children were going to require a great deal of time and care.

The book gave me insight into Plath, but I certainly didn't feel sorry for her. In my opinion her own impulsiveness and childish behavior were the root causes of her problems, not anything else. She seemed to me to be one of those people who is obsessed with obtaining life milestones (published work, marriage, children) as quickly as possible and then feel burdened once they have what they want. Obviously she had some chemical imbalance problems and in today's world probably would have been medicated before she committed suicide, but she had kind of a hysterical personality aside from the manic depression.

The book is worth reading if you have any interest in Plath, but expect a lot of sympathy for the Plath family in lieu of balanced fact-reporting.

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Summary: The worst Plath biography
Review: This is the worst of the Plath biographies; lurid, unscrupulous and shallow. For numerous reasons, this biography is unworthy of the attention of any individual with a serious interest in Plath and her work. This biography is virtually devoid of literary criticism; instead, its locus is Plath's sexuality. Rather than treating this subject sensitively, Alexander chooses to crudely fictionalize Plath's experiences, for, one assumes, maximum voyeuristic pleasure. I am also incensed by Alexander's treatment of Ted Hughes and the tragic suicide of his lover Assia Wevill: to paraphrase Janet Malcolm in her brilliant study "The Silent Woman," he eagerly demonizes Hughes to the cusp of libel law. Luckily, Alexander's hateful assumptions about Hughes have been discounted by the publication of Birthday Letters and Plath's unedited journals. In summary, Rough Magic is a poorly-written, one-dimensional portrait of Sylvia Plath not intended for the serious Plath scholar.