The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume 1, 1940-1956 Edited by Peter K Steinberg and Karen V Kukil - review

The more we know, the more compelling Plath becomes, says Andrew Wilson
Untroubled: Sylvia Plath on holiday in 1953
© Estate of Gordon Lameyer; courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University
Andrew Wilson19 October 2017

Have we reached peak Plath yet? It seems not. The author of The Bell Jar and poet who produced such controversial lines as “Every woman adores a fascist” still holds a grip on the popular imagination.

This latest publication is the first of two volumes of Plath’s collected letters, a book that has already made news with its fresh material. “I think if anything ever happened to you,” Sylvia wrote in one of 15 previously unpublished letters to her new husband, Ted Hughes, in 1956,

“I would really kill myself.”

Plath, of course, committed suicide in London in 1963 at the age of 30, after a recurrence of the depression that dogged her youth and the discovery that her husband had been unfaithful.

In the foreword to this book the couple’s daughter, Frieda Hughes, outlines how her father championed his wife’s work. He was responsible for the publication of the groundbreaking 1965 collection Ariel, the volume that contains the poems Daddy and Lady Lazarus. However, it seems odd for Frieda to add, “It has always been my conviction that the reason my mother should be of interest to readers at all is due to my father.” After all, Hughes doesn’t make his first appearance until page 1,120 of this hefty volume, and only 16 of the 856 letters are addressed to him.

As I argued in my 2013 biography Mad Girl’s Love Song, the poet’s life and work have been overshadowed and defined by that “big, dark, hunky boy” whom Sylvia first met in Cambridge in 1956. Famously, Hughes dismissed anything his wife wrote before that year — poems, essays, stories, letters — as juvenilia, “impurities thrown off from the various stages of the inner transformation, by-products of the internal work”.

The contents of this new book, expertly edited by the Plath scholars and archivists Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil, once again prove Hughes wrong. These letters are by turns poignant, revelatory, banal, hilarious and self-absorbed, documenting as they do the changing moods, ambitions and intellectual and creative development of one of the 20th-century’s most celebrated poets.

For the first time we see the complete and unedited letters that Plath wrote to her mother, Aurelia, who had made the decision to publish the 1975 book, Letters Home. That highly censored volume was inspired by a mother’s wish to show the world that her daughter was not the spiteful young woman who could write The Bell Jar, a novel that Aurelia said was full of caricatures of people Sylvia was supposed to have loved and as such represented “the basest ingratitude”.

Despite Plath’s near-pathological prolificacy, there are inevitably some gaps in this new volume, particularly a silence around some of Sylvia’s lovers. If you are looking for Plath’s letters to boyfriend Dick Norton, the model for the dreadful Buddy Willard in The Bell Jar, you won’t find them here — he has never released them. Letters to Richard Sassoon (the man who dumped Sylvia and drove her into the arms of Ted Hughes) are sparse and have been reproduced from extracts that have already appeared.

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And so the public appetite for all things Plath continues. Why the continued fascination? In addition to the blistering poetry, there is the allure of her quixotic identity. “Most of us who knew Sylvia knew a different Sylvia,” wrote her friend Clarissa Roche. “In a curious way she seemed uncompleted.” While Plath’s personality — which Roche compared to fragments of quivering mercury — may resist definition, these letters serve as a step towards a greater understanding of one of our most compelling modern poets.

Andrew Wilson is the author of Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

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