Elizabeth Winder – Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 (2013) Review

“She was starting to understand the difficulties faced by any writer, and how hard it is to maintain a ‘balanced’ life, especially for women. The push and pull of needing solitude and experience – the endless conflict of it.”

“I am worn out now with the strenuous days at the office and the heat and the evenings out. I want to come home and sleep and… get tan again”. Sylvia Plath

In January 2013, Sylvia Plath’s only novel The Bell Jar (1963) turned fifty, an anniversary which suddenly ignited people’s interest once more in both the book and the real events that inspired it. Elizabeth Winder’s new book, ‘Pain, Parties, Work’ – a quote from Plath – is a  timely look into the summer of 1953 when the poet worked in the coveted position of guest editor with nineteen other girls on Mademoiselle’s ‘College Issue’. In Plath’s novel, she describes in harsh, cynical prose the realities of being a young twenty-year-old woman working in New York during a cultural crisis in which women received mixed messages about their place in the world. Women were being told for the first time that they could have careers and many single girls flocked to New York City, but they were also still expected to be wives and mothers. As Winder describes it, “the difficulties Sylvia endured were not unique, but part of a larger crisis – being an ambitious, curious girl in the 1950s”. Read more