How Sylvia Plath’s secret miscarriage transforms our understanding of her poetry

Sylvia Plath wrote a series of 14 intensely personal letters to her psychologist that were only recently uncovered. Amy T. Zielinski/Getty Images

In 2017, one of Sylvia Plath’s private letters, which had previously not been made public, included a startling revelation: Plath suggested that her husband, poet Ted Hughes, was responsible for the miscarriage of their child in February 1961.

Heather Clark’s recent biography of Plath, “Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath,” includes this new information. But no scholarship has yet to contextualize the painful event as a means to reinterpret two of Plath’s most autobiographical poems, “The Rabbit Catcher” and “Thalidomide.”