Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted is a memoir by author Andrew Wilson.
On February 25, 1956, 23-year-old Sylvia Plath walked into a party and discovered Ted Hughes, whom she described as a ‘big, dark, muscular guy’. Sylvia sees Ted as something gigantic, and to this day, his giant shadow has overshadowed Plath’s life and work.

She committed suicide in February 1963, Hughes became Plath’s literary enforcer, protector of her works. He considered Plath’s prose writing to be the ‘waste’ of her ‘false self’, and his determination was to market her later poem – written after she started it. beginning a relationship with him – as the pinnacle of her career means her past work has been marginalized.

Mad Girl’s Love Song takes back years before Ted, drawing on exclusive interviews with friends and lovers, as well as previously unavailable archives and papers, to focus on life first of the most famous and enduring female poets of the 20th century.

This is a very satisfying book. I often crave a Sylvia Plath biography about the time before she met Ted Hughes. For me, Plath’s childhood and college years were the most exciting parts of her life. There are new documents included, which are refreshed.

Plath’s mother, Aurelia, was not given enough credit or praise. She is a very knowledgeable woman who just wants her children to succeed. Congratulations to Aurelia for keeping her daughter’s memory alive long after her death. Aurelia saved every scrap of document Plath wrote, even keeping a grocery list. She thinks her daughter is special and precious, and she enjoys everything her daughter does.

I also appreciate that Andrew Wilson is not judgmental or indifferent towards Plath. All of his conclusions seem reasonable. I also want to applaud Andrew Wilson for being able to bring out the negative aspects of Plath’s life in a non-condemning way, and his explanations are more logical than emotional.

• Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

• By: Andrew Wilson

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