“She never gave her mother much credit for anything. But just as she wrote both for and against her powerful, overbearing father in her poetry, so did she write for and against her emotionally absent mother.”
“From a young age she had dreamed of the literary immortality . . . held out as a possibility for her if only she worked hard enough for it.”
“In her letters home, she sounded like a typical boy-crazy coed.”
“She had an idea of what a conventionally popular college girl should be and do, and she was determined to fit that mold even as she aimed to break molds in her writing.”
“This year I have continued working at both poetry and fiction. I hope to grow more skilled at prose forms and I keep discovering how much more I need to learn about poetry.”
“Interestingly, for someone who would achieve international acclaim as a poet, she describes herself as ‘Continually beginning the Great American Novel.’”
“her opaquely smiling mother . . . . fell short as a mother and role model for her sensitive, high-strung daughter.”
“Once again she could present herself as the perfect daughter, a model of talent, hard work, thoughtfulness, and girlish insouciance. It was a persona she had adopted a long time ago. She was sick of it, but it wasn’t easily set aside without a replacement of some sort. Pleasing and impressing [parent] was practically a full-time job”
“She envisioned her future as a writer and married woman with steady resolve and little idea of the difficulties the combination would entail.”
Quotations above are from the biography of poet Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath’s contemporary and her poetic rival. The Power of Adrienne Rich, by Hilary Holladay, was published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday in November 2020.
Like Plath, Rich (1929-2012), was a child prodigy with an ambitious parent; the daughter of a scientist/academic; earned prizes and honors, impressing her college profs as “the most brilliant student I ever taught”; after graduation attended not Cambridge on a Fulbright but Oxford on a Guggenheim; used a Ouija board; had a boyfriend confined to the TB sanatorium
at Saranac Lake, NY; entered the Yale Younger Poets competition (Rich won it in 1951); had a
first-reading contract with The New Yorker; built a network of big names; married, had children, and supported her brilliant husband’s career. In the 1950s Rich met Plath, who was three years younger and envied Rich to the point of nausea. [1] They did not become friends. Yet how alike their formative experiences were.
[1] Sylvia Plath to Gordon Lameyer, letter of July 28, 1955.