THE LETTERS OF SYLVIA PLATH

VOL II: 1956-1963

ED. PETER STEINBERG AND KAREN V KUKIL Faber, 1,025pp, £35, Oldie price £22.76 inc p&p

This 1,000-page thumper contains the letters written by Sylvia Plath in the last eight years of her life. The most electrifying material, wrote the

Observer’s Rachel Cooke, is the 14 letters Plath wrote to her psychiatrist, and they are ‘extraordinary, throwing vital light on Plath’s mental state in the period after she discovered Hughes’s affair with Assia Wevill’. But these, she complained, are buried in page upon page of dull letters to her mother about home-making ‘written in her brightest, most determined voice – the one that brooks no argument, that allows for no hint of a shadow’: ‘Over the course of so long a book, Plath’s voice, hectoring and frequently manipulative, is undoubtedly wearying.’

John Carey in the Sunday Times disagreed: ‘To regard the letters merely as raw material for poems undervalues them. They are astonishing in themselves, terrible in their intensity and as raw as freshly sliced meat. As a real-life depiction of a mind in agony they are, so far as I know, unmatched in literature.’

Elizabeth Lowry in the Guardian was equally excited: ‘Her energy even when she is doing or observing the most ordinary things vaults off the page. She paints floors, sews curtains, learns Italian and speedwriting […] keeps the household accounts, mows the lawn. She has an uncanny ability to make the mundane strange.’