Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted - Tapa dura

He has conjured up a youthful and vibrant Plath, albeit one with a disturbing shadow side - Independent on Sunday

An idiosyncratic, sideways-look biography - Observer
Sylvia Plath s secrets are hidden in plain sight - Sunday Telegraph

A refreshingly inquiring book, uncovering new, intimate perspectives on Plath s life...It has the tautness of the first act of a great tragedy, where we see the hand of fate moving the pieces into place - Sunday Times

A revealing biography of an unmarried Sylvia Plath - The Times

the first book to concentrate on Plath s early life in America, the years that shaped the path her life and work would take...With Wilson s excellent book one feels...that a balance is being redressed - Sunday Express

Here is progress: a book that makes a case for rage, without picking a fight with Hughes - Daily Telegraph

This book succeeds in putting her marriage to Hughes in a new, less fateful perspective - Sunday Telegraph

The fullest picture yet of the birth and growth of a troubled genius...audacious - The Tablet

focuses on her early, pre-Ted life for a change, and includes previously unpublished photographs - WeLoveThisBook.com

reveals the torment and emotional frailty that bedevilled the young Sylvia Plath - Sunday Times

Most important, Mr Wilson s chronicle of Plath s early relationships with boys and men allows readers in a very different era to understand the regime of repression and hypocrisy under which she suffered - International Herald Tribune

focusing on the early part of her life, before she met Hughes, reclaiming her from the tangle of emotions associated with Hughes. A commendable aim - Guardian

Sylvia Plath s life before Ted Hughes was complex and often disturbing: this intimate biography gives unique and rare insight into her early life --Stylist

'It was in London that Sylvia Plath met Ted Hughes and wrote some of her most profound poetry. She loved the capital more than anywhere else in the world, but it was also the scene of her ultimate tragedy. Andrew Wilson takes a tour of Sylvia's city.' --ES Magazine, Evening Standard

From an award-winning author comes a groundbreaking biography of Sylvia Plath, focusing on her childhood, adolescence, and early years of writing, creating a new portrait of this iconic yet still mysterious literary legend.

A new biography of Sylvia Plath, a literary icon who continues to haunt, fascinate, and enthrall even now, fifty years after her death

On February 25 , 1956, twenty-three-year-old Sylvia Plath walked into a party and immediately spotted Ted Hughes. This encounter—now one of the most famous in all of literary history—was recorded by Plath in her journal, where she described Hughes as a “big, dark, hunky boy.” Sylvia viewed Ted as something of a colossus, and to this day his enormous shadow has obscured her life and work. The sensational aspects of the Plath-Hughes relationship have dominated the cultural landscape to such an extent that their story has taken on the resonance of a modern myth.

Before she met Ted, Plath had lived a complex, creative, and disturbing life. Her father had died when she was only eight; she had gone out with literally hundreds of men, had been unofficially engaged, had tried to commit suicide, and had written more than two hundred poems. Mad Girl’s Love Song chronicles these early years, traces the sources of her mental instability, and examines how a range of personal, economic, and societal factors—the real disquieting muses— conspired against her.

Drawing on exclusive interviews with friends and lovers who have never spoken openly about Plath before and using previously unavailable archives and papers, this is the first book to focus on the early life of the twentieth century’s most popular and enduring female poet. Mad Girl’s Love Song reclaims Sylvia Plath from the tangle of emotions associated with her relationship with Ted Hughes and reveals the origins of her unsettled and unsettling voice.