Is Sylvia Plath a beach read? One Ventnor author sure thinks so.

VENTNOR, N.J. — The beach can be a place for deep thoughts, even while it beckons to you to escape them, and there may be no better person to revel in all its contradictions than Emily Van Duyne.

Van Duyne, 44, grew up as part of one of the Jersey Shore’s most storied local families, the inventors of the iconic Van Duyne fiberglass surf boats, all while nurturing a deep love for and fascination with Sylvia Plath, the poet and author who died by suicide in 1963.

Emily Van Duyne is fourth-generation Ventnor, the ultimate local — “My great-grandparents came here on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle with a side car from Newark in 1919,” she says.

The oldest of three girls whose uncle is still (for now) building the lifeguard boats that line the Jersey Shore, Van Duyne transcended her surroundings to became a poet and Sylvia Plath scholar, now with a critically well-received new book from W.W. Norton & Company, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation.

The Washington Post called the book an indictment — “of both a culture that misreads Plath and of Ted Hughes, Britain’s longtime poet laureate.”

The Los Angeles Times said Van Duyne, “carefully, almost tenderly, combines research with experience.” Kirkus called it a “thoughtful book debut with a revisionist take on “the life, death, and literary afterlife” of Sylvia Plath.”

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But does Van Duyne think it’s a beach read?

“I do, I totally do,” she said in a recent interview from her home in Ventnor Heights. “Plath herself is such a reader-friendly writer. People read The Bell Jar, it’s one of those potboiler books. She meant it to be a page-turner.”

It’s easy to imagine a brooding young Emily sitting on the Ventnor beach summer day after summer day, grappling with the poetry, meaning, and devastating life arc of Sylvia Plath, whose relationship with and abuse at the hands of Hughes is at the core of Van Duyne’s rigorously researched and bracingly personal book.

Van Duyne grew up immersed in the local culture of island life, building her fragile sand castles, swimming in the ocean and bay, all while her inner life was mining the depths of Plath.

“My friends wanted to lie on the beach and flirt with boys,” said Van Duyne, who teaches writing at Stockton University. “I wanted to read and write vigorously. I was an outsider who was supposed to be an insider.”

It was an intense childhood, a time when young beach badge checkers partied with older men in their 20s, and “nobody thought that was weird.”

“People who were really talented athletically and attractive were given a blank check to do what they wanted,” she said. “It was dangerous for lots of people. Some died really young.”

“I grew up on an island where water sports and lifeguarding are serious business,” Van Duyne said, “which was definitely in conflict with the kind of intellectual pursuits that Plath presented me.”

But that tension also bore fruit for Van Duyne, who notes, “writing is typically produced by conflict and ambivalence.” And it was a teacher at Atlantic City High School, the writing mentor Peter Murphy, who first introduced Van Duyne to Plath’s work.

Murphy gave her an anthology of poems (not by Plath) about the Jersey Shore and wrote, “Not such a bad place to be from after all.”

It turns out that Sylvia Plath also loved the beach.

In her essay “Ocean1212-W,” Van Duyne writes of Plath, “The ocean is the center of her childhood world. When she hears the sound of breathing, she can’t be sure if it is her mother’s breath or the ocean.”

Plath described the beach landscape as “not land but the end of the land — the cold, salt running hills of the Atlantic.”

In the essay, the land is hit by a hurricane, but “my grandmother had her broom out, it would soon be right.”

“Women here are as elemental as breath and water,” Van Duyne writes, “able to right disasters with domestic tools.”

Her book’s cover image is of Plath from the mid-1950s, on the beach in Cape Cod eating chocolate chip cookies. “She was a nanny in the summers between college,” Van Duyne said. “She’s totally a beach read.”

“The ocean for her, it becomes a way of her thinking through the circumstances of her life,” Van Duyne said. “It’s not just about the water. It’s about the danger of the ocean, the lure and the threat that exist simultaneously.”

The joke in the Van Duyne family is that they built lifeboats because “none of us could swim,” she said.

But, like Esther in The Bell Jar, who tries to drown by swimming out in the ocean, but is too strong a swimmer, and keeps bobbing to the surface, Van Duyne is, in fact, a strong swimmer. She swims most summer mornings in the bay.

“I became obsessed with swimming,” she said.

Van Duyne weaves her own harrowing experience with intimate partner violence with an ex, the father of her oldest son, into the book’s narrative, and explores how, and why, women scholars who tried to write about Plath were repeatedly stymied.

She notes how the “intense affinity” felt by so many women, teens and adults toward Plath is both trivialized and discouraged by society, particularly the gatekeepers of literary criticism, who prefer and reward “a cool critical distance.”

She says she included her own story because women are typically told they shouldn’t write about those things, “because we don’t have objectivity about them, because your vision is clouded.”

“That’s sort of silly,” she said. “We understand experience to be a hallmark of how you teach. Someone who’s been through these things, we should listen to them. After I experienced intimate partner violence and revisited Plath’s work, I saw things I never saw before. “

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In the end, Van Duyne writes, “What does it mean to love Sylvia Plath?”

“For decades, I was told that writing about Plath from the perspective of an admirer was disastrous,” she writes. Her admirers were taught to be afraid of their love, that they too were “grim and, if not fated to die, then “unnaturally interested in death and dying.”

Her message in Loving Sylvia Plath is fear not.

“In between the Plath writing of death and suicide and the daily Plath who baked pies and changed nappies,” Van Duyne writes, “there is a wildness that I continue to seek.”