About this item
Highlights
- A luminous portrayal of a brilliant mind who is at once at battle with herself and with the constraints that society has placed on her.A woman's life, erupting with brilliance and promise, is fissured by betrayal and the pressures of duty.
- About the Author: Elin Cullhed (1983) made her debut in 2019 with her critically lauded YA novel The Gods (published in Sweden as Gudarna).
- 304 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Literary
Description
About the Book
A luminous portrayal of a brilliant mind who is at once at battle with herself and with the constraints that society has placed on herBook Synopsis
A luminous portrayal of a brilliant mind who is at once at battle with herself and with the constraints that society has placed on her.
A woman's life, erupting with brilliance and promise, is fissured by betrayal and the pressures of duty. What had once seemed a pastoral family idyll has become a trap, and she struggles between being the wife and mother she is bound to be and wanting to do and be so much more.
The woman in question is Sylvia Plath in the final year of her life, reimagined in fictive form by Elin Cullhed, who seizes the flame of Plath's blistering, creative fire in Euphoria, lending a voice to women everywhere who stand with one foot in domesticity and the other in artistic creation.
As Plath's marriage to Ted Hughes unravels through the heady days of their first summer in Devon together, Sylvia turns increasingly to writing to express her pain and loss, yet also her resilience and power. She has decided to die, but the art she creates in her final weeks will set her name, and the world, ablaze.
Review Quotes
A sensitive and artistic account of a woman attempting to write herself out of oblivion . . . not a book about death, it is a book about art, more specifically, female art, and its resilience and endurance-- "Sunday Business Post"
Compelling and visceral-- "Irish Examiner"
An audacious, gripping novel . . . a book for our times-- "Guardian"
A novel about the conflicted emotional underbelly of female experience - including childbirth, desire, envy, rage, insecurity, ambition . . . Brave-- "Times Literary Supplement"
Compelling-- "BBC History Magazine"
Imagines the hopes, fears, dreams and memoirs of [Plath's] final months, as well as the growing tensions between the worlds of creativity and domesticity. Based on archival research but explicitly a work of fiction, Elin Cullhed's book aims to focus not on Plath's death but instead on the complexities and contradictions of her life-- "History Revealed"
Original...vivid, highly dramatic treatment of the intimate details of Plath's troubled life and marriage to the poet Ted Hughes-- "Booklist"
Euphoria is about the fissures between motherhood, love and creativity but is also a celebration of Plath's power-- "Evening Standard"
About the Author
Elin Cullhed (1983) made her debut in 2019 with her critically lauded YA novel The Gods (published in Sweden as Gudarna). Euphoria is her first novel for adults. Cullhed became obsessed with the life and work of Sylvia Plath when she found herself in a similar position: mother to several young children, wife of another writer, struggling to find space and time for her own work. Euphoria is a meticulously researched work of historical fiction, drawing extensively from Plath's own journals and work from this time. Elin lives in Sweden.