PositiveThe Women\'s Review of BooksClark stands firmly in the camp of Plath biographers who do not define the artist by her suicide. A good detective, Clark uses unpublished letters, manuscripts, and diaries; court, police, and psychiatric records; and new interviews to rescue facts from the fictions Plath’s sensationalists have built careers on. Her scholarship (exhaustive at 1152 pages) frees the artist from the vengeful hausfrau killed by her \'murderous art,\' as Elizabeth Hardwick wrote in 1971 ... Refusing to see her subject as doom-ridden allows Clark to offer entirely new insights into Plath’s creative process ... If Clark avoids the \'cultural baggage\' so many Plath biographers have indulged in, I question whether the level of detail, vital in documenting the last weeks of Plath’s life, serves the reader well in tracing her early years (do we really need to know every guy she dated and what cocktails they drank?). But if Plath felt abandoned in the winter of 1963, the medical history Clark uncovers suggests reasons.
