Though their poetry, personalities and lives were vastly different, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton are inextricably bound in the public imagination. Just a few years apart in age and hailing from the same Massachusetts town, these two poets pushed boundaries in their highly confessional work. Additionally, the fact that both women died by suicide fuels their legacies.

Plath and Sexton did know each other, though not well. In 1959, shortly before Plath moved to England, the two women attended a Boston writing workshop led by Robert Lowell. After class, they would convene at the bar of the Ritz-Carlton to talk poetry and, one presumes, share some intimate details from their lives. These undocumented, informal gabfests provide the thin thread with which Plath scholar Gail Crowther connects the pair in Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz, her thoroughly engrossing examination of these two disparate, talented and troubled poetic geniuses.

The casual acquaintance of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton takes on a greater significance in an engrossing new study.

Crowther synthesizes Plath’s and Sexton’s individual stories into a seamless narrative. Many details will be familiar to die-hard acolytes of either or both poets—the bouts of mental illness and failure of psychiatric treatments, the turbulent marriages and sexual indiscretions, the unyielding resistance they encountered when they dared to play by their own rules—but Crowther’s clever integration of these two lives reveals the strong connections between them in new and surprising ways. For example, she rightly identifies both women as rebels who fearlessly pushed against social constraints before second-wave feminism made it more acceptable for women to bare the truth about their inner conflicts, contradictions and sexuality.

Crowther also searches for the differences between how Plath and Sexton conducted their lives—as daughters, wives, mothers and poets. Although the contrast between the orderly Plath and the wild-spirited Sexton could at times be dramatic (a difference that plays out in their poetic voices as well), there is a shared poignancy in the personal struggles these women experienced.

Since there was no fly on the wall during those martini-soaked afternoons at the Ritz, we, like Crowther, can only surmise what was said. And with little evidence to draw on beyond a few passing comments in diaries and letters, and one poem Sexton wrote after Plath’s death, Crowther perhaps speculates a bit too much about what each of these women may or may not have thought of the other. Despite this leap, she makes a convincing case that the ripple effects of Plath’s and Sexton’s not-so-quiet rebellions are still being felt. “Plath and Sexton are still with us,” she writes near the end of this passionate and affecting study, “agitating with their voices, exposing all those wrongs that still exist, and all those universal themes that will never go away: love, death, sex, pain, joy.”

Although Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ novel The Yearling is well known—it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939—its author has yet to receive the same level of attention. A contemporary and friend of Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway (with whom she fished) and Thomas Wolfe (with whom she shared the celebrated editor Maxwell Perkins), Rawlings captured the raw beauty and untamed wilderness of north central Florida and its denizens long before the area cut down its orange groves to make way for unbridled commercial development. Ann McCutchan offers an absorbing, affectionate and long overdue portrait of Rawlings and her writings in The Life She Wished to Live: A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Author of The Yearling.

Drawing deeply on Rawlings’ archives, McCutchan chronicles the details of Rawlings’ life, from her childhood in Washington, D.C., where she won a prize in a writing contest for her story “The Reincarnation of Miss Hetty”; to her college years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she edited the literary magazine and met Charles Rawlings, who would become her first husband; to her early years as a journalist in Louisville, Kentucky, and Rochester, New York; to her eventual move to Cross Creek, Florida. There, she established herself as a writer, creating enduring, memorable portraits of rural Florida and its inhabitants, both human and nonhuman.

McCutchan looks closely at Rawlings’ letters, stories, novels and memoirs and mines the ways they reveal Rawlings’ writerly mind, her desire to probe the relationship between men and women, families and individuals, and her ability to evoke a sense of place, especially the paradise of her corner of Florida. Rawlings was also, according to McCutchan, cosmically conscious, which led her to write about the interconnections between all living things. The Life She Wished to Live is the biography that Rawlings has long deserved.

One of the greatest English-language playwrights of the last half-century, Tom Stoppard is known for such canonical plays as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Thing and Arcadia. He also won an Oscar for his Shakespeare in Love screenplay. Stoppard is now 83 and still creating (his play Leopoldstadt was the hottest ticket in London before theaters were shut down by the COVID-19 pandemic), so an authoritative biography of this celebrated writer may seem premature. But the highly accomplished biographer Hermione Lee, at Stoppard’s behest, has produced just that. Tom Stoppard: A Life is a capacious and exhaustive book that attempts to infiltrate his art while chronicling his life’s journey—and what a journey it has been.

Stoppard, viewed as quintessentially English and unquestionably one of the most brilliant manipulators of the English language, was not born British. Before he was 2, his family fled the Nazis from what is now the Czech Republic. First settling in Singapore, where his father was killed in a Japanese air attack, the family then sought refuge in India, where young Tom began his education in “Englishness.” 

After the war, the future playwright bypassed university in England and started a hard-knock climb in journalism. Hanging with the local theater crowd in provincial Bristol—including an up-and-coming actor named Peter O’Toole—Stoppard found his true home. As the swinging ’60s unfurled, Stoppard launched his theatrical career through a singular talent for infusing esoteric ideas and experimental concepts into plays with commercial viability.

Lee, who conducted more than 100 interviews and enjoyed unrestricted access to her subject, painstakingly details Stoppard’s personal life—his troubled first marriage, his personal and working friendships, his relationships with his mother and children. By her account, Stoppard is generally congenial and well liked, so there is little in the way of scandal or fraught behind-the-scenes show business drama. Stoppard himself admits to having a charmed life.

The most absorbing parts of Stoppard’s story involve his rediscovery of his Jewish roots and the ways he has indirectly mined his own family’s experiences in his work—not to produce autobiographical plays but rather to explore the political turmoil and tragedies of the 20th century. While Stoppard has often been accused of being an overly clever or cerebral playwright who avoids the personal and the emotional in his work, Lee makes a solid case for the true depth, as well as the surface brilliance, of his enduring plays. 

Mike Nichols, another émigré genius of the theatre, called Stoppard “the most expressive playwright of our time . . . the only writer I know who is completely happy.” Tom Stoppard: A Life affirms that appraisal.