Since her suicide in 1963, Sylvia Plath, the confessional poet and author of the classic coming-of-age novel "The Bell Jar," has been an object of fascination and subject of a steady stream of biographies, with the latest, Heather Clark's "Red Comet," nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Plath has been given the Hollywood treatment (the flawed 2003 biopic "Sylvia"), prompted more than one stage play and inspired songs by an array of artists, including Ryan Adams and Lana Del Rey.
In the realm of fiction, Kate Moses based her splendid novel "Wintering" on the end of Plath's life, after her storybook marriage to poet Ted Hughes fell apart because of his infidelity. It is into this rich oeuvre that journalist Lee Kravetz enters with his highly readable, entertaining "The Last Confessions of Sylvia P." Part truth, part fiction, the novel is an ingenious addition to an ever-growing body of work about Plath that has helped make her an American literary icon.
Divided into nine sections, or "stanzas," the novel consists of three story lines featuring three women connected to Plath. The first narrative centers on Estee, a 65-year-old curator employed by an auction house in Boston, who in 2019 is charged with authenticating and auctioning off newly discovered notebooks containing a handwritten draft of "The Bell Jar."
The second story line is about a lengthy letter written by Boston Rhodes, a pen name for poet Agatha White, to her teacher Robert Lowell during which she reveals her intense jealousy of Plath, who was a member of Lowell's poetry seminar in 1958. The fictional Rhodes is clearly based on Anne Sexton, whose real-life friendship with Plath was chronicled over the years by Sexton and others.
The third story line focuses on Dr. Ruth Barnhouse, a psychiatrist who treated Plath at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts in 1953 after her failed suicide attempt at age 20, the ordeal at the heart of "The Bell Jar."
Expertly woven together, the three story lines tell one story. Following her breakdown in 1953, Plath enters McLean, where Barnhouse, the only female psychiatrist on staff, nurses her back to health; while there, Plath meets Lowell, a "mad poet" regularly in residence at the hospital. Five years later, Plath, now married to Hughes, takes a class with Lowell where she meets Rhodes, who believes that "Sylvia was a success in all the ways I was not."
Even so, the two women become friends and, often joined by classmates Maxine Kumin and George Starbuck, undertake martini-filled escapades in the bar at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston after class. But jealousy consumes Rhodes, who out of spite surreptitiously photographs Hughes with another woman at a library and then, years later, anonymously mails the picture to Plath. Seeing the incriminating picture, Rhodes decides, was the last straw for Plath, who reacted by killing herself.
It is now that the "Bell Jar" notebooks — the thread that connects the three story lines — come into play as they are stolen from Plath's flat in London after her death and pass through the hands of most of the novel's main characters (Rhodes, Barnhouse, Lowell) before arriving on the desk of Estee, who turns out to be the daughter of Rhodes, the child who once found her mother clinging to life after she tried to asphyxiate herself in a car in the garage.
