Mary Ventura and The Ninth Kingdom: A Story

by Sylvia Plath Narrated by Orlagh Cassidy

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

APRIL 2019 - AudioFile

With only 40 minutes at her disposal, narrator Orlagh Cassidy turns Mary Ventura, a naïve and compliant young woman, into a frantic yet resolved individual who is willing to risk all to save herself from a preordained fate. Sylvia Plath’s allegorical story was rejected when first submitted for publication in 1952, as this audiobook’s introduction informs us, and it languished until the present day. The story is cleanly and clearly executed by Cassidy. While the writing could be judged simplistic and rough, consulting both Plath's poetry and the classics reveals it to be as fully realized and dark a vision as is found in a better-known contemporary work, Shirley Jackson's “The Lottery.” K.W. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2019 - AudioFile

With only 40 minutes at her disposal, narrator Orlagh Cassidy turns Mary Ventura, a naïve and compliant young woman, into a frantic yet resolved individual who is willing to risk all to save herself from a preordained fate. Sylvia Plath’s allegorical story was rejected when first submitted for publication in 1952, as this audiobook’s introduction informs us, and it languished until the present day. The story is cleanly and clearly executed by Cassidy. While the writing could be judged simplistic and rough, consulting both Plath's poetry and the classics reveals it to be as fully realized and dark a vision as is found in a better-known contemporary work, Shirley Jackson's “The Lottery.” K.W. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173491565
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	01/22/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

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