Alice Walsh’s Analyzing Sylvia Plath: An Academic Mystery

Walsh is a Nova Scotia-based writer, and Analyzing Sylvia Plath is her third novel.

I much preferred the first two, and I’m writing about Death on Darby’s Island and Last Lullaby in my book project. Both are set in Newfoundland and Labrador, and they’re wonderfully atmospheric with strong plotting and a distinctive sense of place.

So I’m a bit baffled by Analyzing Sylvia Plath, which has a terrific premise and very strong opening chapters.

Isobel Harding, an English professor at a Nova Scotia university, endured a painful early childhood history: the loss of her mother; estrangement from her father; and a subsequent foster/adoption experience that was, fortunately, very successful.

Now she is helping to organize Evangeline University’s literary conference, and she has invited her aunt, Dr. Elizabeth Wilcox, a psychologist-turned literary critic, to be a speaker.

Wilcox is the author of a sensationally successful re-interpretation of Sylvia Plath’s life and work which argues that her writing elliptically portrays childhood sexual abuse by her father. This assessment has brought Wilcox (who attended grad school in English lit later in life, after blowing up her career as a psychologist through alcohol and drug use that left her temporarily homeless) tremendous acclaim.

When Isobel picks up her aunt at the airport, they are confronted by another traveler from New York City, an old friend of Elizabeth’s from her days in a street-involved life. After an awkward moment, Elizabeth agrees to take her old friend back to her hotel and allow her to stay with her, confiding to Isobel that her friend has been trailing her at public appearances.

In what appears to be an attempt to poison Elizabeth at the conference opening reception, the friend is killed after ingesting the contents of Elizabeth’s glass.

But things go off the rails, both for the characters and for the novel’s plot, as it progresses.

We leave behind the Nova Scotia setting for a trip to New York.

Isobel learns that her aunt is a plagiarist–and worse.

To avoid spoilers, since this is a relatively recent novel, I’ll leave it at that.

The novel is filled with misconceptions about academic literary study, and while that may not bother all readers, it really bothered me. The depictions of grad school, academic research, and literary conferences are all distant from my own lived experience. Even the portrayal of New York, a city I know fairly well, didn’t ring true.

And the plot holes are sometimes rather gaping, in a novel that abounds with coincidences and hastily resolved twists.

What troubled me the most is the inconsistency of characterization, and the reader’s inability to count on the protagonist’s ability to interpret the people she is closest to, in a book where it really matters whether, for instance, Isobel’s ex is lovelorn and protective–or stalking her.

There’s a big difference.

I was intrigued by the novel’s premise, and I’ll note that yesterday, February 11th, marked 63 years since Sylvia Plath’s death in 1963.

There are some wonderful, recently available photos of her and her young children available online; check out the Instagram account Loving Sylvia Plath, for some terrifically revealing shots in which Plath looks happy during the final months of her life.

And I’m open to re-interpretations of Plath’s life, both in crime fiction and in literary analysis.

I think Walsh is alluding to the acclaim (and notoriety) of Louise DeSalvo’s assessment of Virginia Woolf through the lens of early childhood sexual abuse.

But for Plath scholars, things are a bit murkier: the poet was immersed in Freudian discourse when she was writing poems about her parents (“Daddy”; “Electra on Azalea Plath”). So there are intimations of abuse and neglect, including in the speaker’s rage at her father’s premature death, prompted by his own unwillingness to seek early medical treatment that might have saved him. But the idea that a new book about Plath that alleges incest would become an instant international bestseller . . . that’s as far-fetched as a number of the other plot developments here.

But do read Walsh. Start with the first two books. And let me know if you disagree with my assessment of this one.