CaRDÍNaL 
A cult poet and posthumous winner of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize, Sylvia Plath has always astonished readers with the power of her poems; and her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar has become classic. In this outstanding and controversial biography, written despite the wishes of Ted Hughes, Linda Wagner-Martin traces Plath's childhood in Masachusetts, her brilliant academic career, her aggressive ambition to excel both socially and in her writing and the deep anxiety that plagued her all her life and led to her first suicide attempt at the age of twenty. When she came to Cambridge on e fellowship and fell in love with and married Ted Hughes Plath's future looked dazzling But the strain of caring for two infants and balancing her roles as wife and writer preceded a painful breakdown in the 
marriage. Alone in London with her babies in the icy winter of her thirtieth year, after a period of unhappiness that fuelled some of hef finest writing, she ended her life. Linda Wagner-Martin draws on unpublished letters and journals and over two hundred interviews to explore every aspect of Sylvia Plath's life and brings new understanding to her development as writer. 'Ever since her death in 1963 Sylvia Plath has invited easy myth-making: and been forced into the role of the doomed poet, the frustrated female and the proto-feminist. This new biography offers a welcome return to the facts. It also brings us closer to the creative process that enabled her to communicate extreme emotion with chilling clarity F rances Spalding, The Listener Enlists respect as much as sympathy for a writer who all her life was perched on the cliff of her own 
unhappiness Peter Ackroyd, The Times