LETTERS OF SYLVIA PLATH

VOLUME I: 1940–1956

Faber, 1,424pp, £35, Oldie price £22.03 inc p&p

This first volume of Sylvia Plath’s letters has two editors (an archivist and the curator of the Plath archive at Smith College in Massachusetts), takes the poet up to the age of 24 and weighs in at more than 1,400 pages. All the reviewers commented on the book’s unwieldiness, disagreeing only as to its worth. Rachel Cooke in the

Guardian was dismayed by the ‘quotidian sameyness’ of the material and described the book as ‘an object lesson in the weird desperation’ involved in ‘heritage publishing’.

Suzi Feay in the Financial Times complained about ‘niggling textual decisions’ which pitched the volume ‘somewhere between the general reader and the academic’. She wondered about the ‘endless letters from summer camp’ that ‘deflect us from the poet rather than revealing her’. But she hailed the highlight – the letters to and about Ted Hughes: ‘It feels like the story is just beginning,’ she wrote, of the sixteen previously unpublished letters to Hughes, to whom Plath is secretly married by the end of the volume. Elaine Showalter in the Literary

Review praised the book as ‘a portrait of the artist as a young woman, a genre with few examples’. The letters to Hughes were ‘overflowing with exuberant confidence about the anticipated success of their lives together, with seven children, fame and wealth’. Here is Plath in October 1956: ‘Darling, be scrupulous and date your letters. When we are old and spent, they will come asking for letters and we will have them dove-tail-able.’