Mary Ventura and The Ninth Kingdom
Books | Fiction / Short Stories (single author)
3.8
(53)
Sylvia Plath
“[Plath’s] story is stirring, in sneaky, unexpected ways. . . . Look carefully and there’s a new angle here — on how, and why, we read Plath today.”— Parul Sehgal, New York TimesNever before published, this newly discovered story by literary legend Sylvia Plath stands on its own and is remarkable for its symbolic, allegorical approach to a young woman’s rebellion against convention and forceful taking control of her own life. Written while Sylvia Plath was a student at Smith College in 1952, Mary Ventura and The Ninth Kingdom tells the story of a young woman’s fateful train journey.Lips the color of blood, the sun an unprecedented orange, train wheels that sound like “guilt, and guilt, and guilt”: these are just some of the things Mary Ventura begins to notice on her journey to the ninth kingdom.“But what is the ninth kingdom?” she asks a kind-seeming lady in her carriage. “It is the kingdom of the frozen will,” comes the reply. “There is no going back.”Sylvia Plath’s strange, dark tale of female agency and independence, written not long after she herself left home, grapples with mortality in motion.
AD
Buy now:
More Details:
Author
Sylvia Plath
Pages
64
Publisher
HarperCollins
Published Date
2019-01-22
ISBN
0062940848 9780062940841
Community ReviewsSee all
""You make everything sound so mysterious."<br/><br/>3.5⭐<br/><br/>I love Sylvia Plath, and I was so happy to hear that a previously unreleased short story was coming out! Sylvia wrote this story in college, so it isn't as refined as her later works, but it's still a pretty good read. <br/><br/>I loved the sinister aspects of this story, but I wanted more out of it. I wish that it would have been longer so that we could have more detail about what was going on, but it worked out well enough. I think this could have been a pretty creepy story with more work. <br/><br/>The story is clearly supposed to be allegorical...but the allegory itself is not entirely clear. There are a couple different things it could be about, and I've seen other reviews with different theories. I think it's supposed to be about the afterlife, but I'm not totally sure. <br/><br/>The ending was a little bit confusing - it was at odds with the rest of the story, and I'm still not certain about what happened. Even though I didn't grasp everything that want on in this story, I enjoyed reading it. Thank you to Harper Perennial for sending me a copy to review!"
Emily
"Very confusing in a fun way"
Emily Williamson