Letters from the dark side
The tragedy of Sylvia Plath, the beautiful young American poet who gassed herself to death following the end of her marriage in 1963, has become one of the great set-pieces of post-war English literature. In the 54 years since her death in a frozen north London flat, while her children slept in another room, Plath’s persona has become fixed as a doomed genius, driven to despair by her faithless exhusband, Ted Hughes.
Except it wasn’t like that, or at least not in the beginning. In this magisterial collection of her young letters, many of them published here for the first time, Plath emerges as no-one’s idea of a victim. Growing up in postwar Boston, she is a sparky, all-American kid destined for a golden, if somewhat unimaginative, future. To all intents and purposes ‘Sivvy’ is living the American Dream – until it all starts to unravel just as she is leaving her teens. In a particularly harrowing, little-known letter from 1953, she tells an old friend how she recently descended into depression, almost managed to kill herself and ended up in a psychiatric hospital. These events later went into The Bell Jar, Plath’s posthumously published novel, in which she gives a barely disguised autobiographical account of a clever young college student’s descent into madness. This intimate, unedited collection contains more workaday surprises too like just how stingy Plath could be. Recollections from friends who knew her much later describe her as an American princess who bought all-new home furnishings and casually stole food from someone else’s fridge.
The great pleasure of this magnificent edition is being able to follow the events of her extraordinary life as they are unfolding, rather than read about them in condensed form in one of the many biographies. The climax comes, inevitably, in 1956 when Sylvia, at Cambridge, walks into a party and sees a ‘big, dark, hunky boy’ on the other side of the room, Ted Hughes. The rest, as they say, is history.