Summary
Lucy Jones, author of Matrescence, chooses the writer Sylvia Plath.
Sylvia Plath was a precocious, prize-winning child,. Her mother had high expectations for her. Her father had died when she was 8 (but could have been saved if only he'd gone to see a doctor).
When she was well, Plath was energetic, fun, bright, attractive, funny and incredibly smart.
Her first depressive episode at the age of 20, was 'treated' with botched electric shock therapy. She was awake throughout the ordeal, which left her terrified and traumatised.
Lucy Jones believes that Plath has an unfair reputation as a depressing writer, because of the shadow that her suicide casts backwards over her life. But Jones finds Plath's poetry incredibly alive, brave, comforting and inspiring. "I don't think I would have been able to write Matrescence without Plath's work"
Both Lucy Jones and Plath's biographer, Heather Clark, believe that at the end of her life, recently separated and struggling through a particularly bad winter with two very small children, she may have been suffering from post-natal depression.
With archive recordings of Sylvia Plath reading her poems Daddy and Mushrooms, as well as being interviewed with Ted Hughes.
Produced in Bristol by Ellie Richold and presented by Matthew Parris
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:07.3 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. |
| 0:10.5 | Evil genius. |
| 0:11.6 | He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. |
| 0:15.5 | That's like hiding at your own funeral. |
| 0:17.1 | Yeah, a bit great gig. |
| 0:18.6 | I'm Russell Kane. |
| 0:19.6 | Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:44.5 | Today's great life is Sylvia Plath, a poet and novelist who, unfortunately, is sometimes better known for her suicide than for her writing. Hoping to extract Plath from her tragic |
| 0:50.6 | narrative and demonstrate why she deserves her place among the greats is the writer |
| 0:55.4 | Lucy Jones, author of Matrescence, a book about the metamorphosis of motherhood, which was |
| 1:02.4 | inspired in no small part by Sylvia Plath's own bold writing about the maternal experience. |
| 1:09.7 | Lucy, when did you first come across her? |
| 1:11.9 | Can you remember the moment? |
| 1:13.6 | I can't exactly remember, |
| 1:15.1 | but I'm pretty sure it must be something like reading the Belja, |
| 1:18.5 | her novel when I was maybe in my mid-teens. |
| 1:22.6 | And then I did an English degree at UCL, |
| 1:24.8 | and I was very into American poetry, |
| 1:27.2 | but it was more like |
| 1:28.0 | Anne Sexton Elizabeth Bishop but I was aware of of some of her poems and immediately |
| 1:38.0 | struck by the kind of the musicality of her command of language, so her half rhymes, her rhythms, and then her startling |
... |
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