Poet Sylvia Plath returns to her burial place in West Yorkshire, England to view the fourth replacement of her tombstone. The previous ones have been defaced by feminists who chiseled off her married name, claiming it was Ted Hughes who caused Sylvia’s death. Did he? Was her suicide at 30 a good career move? Would she do it again? And what does it say to us today?
Featuring Nancy Madden
Margaret Mead, the world’s foremost anthropologist, is accused of misrepresenting the Samoan culture as sexually permissive. As she summons her rebuttal, we see how amazingly progressive her life and her views are on sexism and racism.
Featuring Julia Brothers
Susan Sontag, the fiercest American intellectual of the 20th century, champions the life of the mind. Whether exploring the origins of ‘camp’ or ‘illness as a metaphor’ she has devoted her life to art, ideas and an unstinting critique of our times. Now, however, when her own time is running out, she wonders if she has made the right choice.
Featuring Julia McNeal
Divine Madness finds the divorced couple, writer Elizabeth Hardwick and poet Robert Lowell, weighing the possibility of reuniting. Lowell, following a frequent bout of manic-depression, left Hardwick seven years earlier to marry an English heiress. He documented that affair in a volume of poetry, The Dolphin, that scandalized the literary world and won him the Pulitzer prize.
Divine Madness explores the questions: Is art worth that much? Can love survive madness and betrayal?