Currently reading
Yeah, I'm obsessed with Sylvia Plath. No Shame.
As the title of this book implies, Sylvia Plath in Devon: A Year's Turning focuses on the time Plath spent at Court Green, her house in Devon. It includes a short memoir by Elizabeth Sigmund, who was Plath's friend at the end of her life. Sigmund also lived in Court Green for a brief period after Plath's death and knew Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, and the woman who came between them, Assia Wevill.
The majority of the book is a kind of expanded timeline of Plath's life at Court Green: dates of parties attended, snippets of letters and journal entries, an overview of which poems were written when. This section ends abruptly when Plath moves to London. The book is further padded with a tedious introduction by Plath's posthumous stalker Peter K. Steinberg, and a rather lovely essay about a poem Sigmund wrote in Plath's memory. I'd read the essay before when an earlier version of it was published online, but it was worth re-reading.
So, now that I've finished reading the book I'm a bit conflicted. Who is this for? What is its purpose? It's short (less than 100 pages, according to Amazon), and expensive ($10 on Kindle) and there's nothing particularly noteworthy here. I do like Crowther's writing style and would be interested in reading more of her work, but I hope any books she publishes in the future are a bit meatier.