About this Event
Join us for evening with Helen Bain and Heather Clark to talk about Helen's latest book The Daffodil Days and the life of Sylvia Plath.
Set in North Tawton, Devon in 1962, The Daffodil Days paints a picture of the community through a multi-perspective narrative – the village doctor, the bell ringer, the shop assistant. And through them and their inner worlds one of the 20th century’s most influential figures, Sylvia Plath, comes into kaleidoscopic focus.
Helen Bain first read Sylvia Plath’s journals when she was 15 years old. In The Daffodil Days she has set out to challenge the two dimensional representation of Plath that is so often associated with the manner of her death, whilst being deeply sensitive to the people and the time she’s writing about. The Daffodil Days is also a novel about the English countryside and small communities – a world that has arguably been lost to the metaverse. And it’s a novel which evokes the understated post war innocence of the 50s and early 60s.
Heather Clark is the author of Red Comet, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography. Drawing on a wealth of new material, Red Comet brings to life the great and tragic poet, Sylvia Plath.
Refusing to read Plath's work as if her every act was a harbinger of her fate, Clark evokes a culture in transition in the mid-twentieth century as she thoroughly explores Sylvia's world. We see Plath's early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; we witness her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes; and, through clear-eyed portraits of the demonised players in the arena of her suicide, we gain a deeper understanding of her final days.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Waterstones, 68-69 Hampstead High Street, London, United Kingdom
GBP 6.00 to GBP 21.00
