Often using vivid and compelling language, Plath addresses many topics in her letters — from politics and literature to her education and love life to her own unbridled literary ambitions and her plans to achieve them. The sheer quantity of the letters — Volume 1 runs to more than 1,300 pages — is as impressive as their quality ... Engaging and revealing, The Letters of Sylvia Plath offers a captivating look into the life and inner thinking of one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.
Frieda Hughes, the couple’s daughter and only surviving child, begins the book of letters with a spectacularly defensive foreword — a tribute less to Plath than to Hughes...There is the effect, slightly comic and horrifying, of the daughter presiding over the vow renewal ceremony for the ghosts of her parents ... to speak of Plath’s letters is to speak of her relationship with Aurelia, to whom she wrote twice a day at times — long letters that swarmed to fill every inch of space on the page and trailed onto the envelopes. This was, no doubt, lovely for her mother (and her biographers), but it can be rough going for even the committed Plathophile ... The achievement of this avalanche of letters — 1,300 pages and counting — is that it disabuses everyone of the notion that Plath wasn’t aware of her contradictions or in (some) control of them. She referenced her two selves every time she went from blonde to brunette. Her honors thesis was, in part, on Dostoevsky’s The Double, after all, in which a self splits, and one kills the other. 'How can you be so many women to so many people,' she once wrote in her journal, 'oh you strange girl?'
Lugging around this rusty anchor of a book – it runs to more than 1,400 pages – what I felt mostly was exasperation. The notion that Plath’s every utterance is sacred would be dumb even if she ranked with Keats or Waugh as one of the truly great letter writers. The fact that she clearly doesn’t – the majority of those in this volume, written to her mother, Aurelia, are marked by their quotidian sameyness – only makes it seem the more vacuous ... The reader, then, is entirely in Plath’s hands, which is not only tricky in narrative terms – ellipses come as standard in correspondence of which you get to read only one side – but also perilously unbalanced. Where does the truth, or what passes for it, ultimately lie? The editors offer us no rudder ... Plath’s letters to the men she imagined she loved before Hughes have a certain too-muchness: a risky intensity of feeling that brings to mind a circus knife-thrower marking an outline with her blades. So, too, do the 16 love letters, owned by her daughter Frieda and now published for the first time, that she wrote to Hughes in 1956, the year they married (and the book’s cut-off point). Nevertheless, it is for these last that you should borrow this collection from your library, and to which you should turn once it’s in your hands. They alone make the prospect of volume two seem fully tantalising.
The assuredness of Plath’s late poetry, written from about 1961 up to her death, was a thing that she worked very hard to achieve. Her letters, on the other hand, are undisciplined and effusive, running on at length … The belief among many of Plath’s devotees seems to be that if we can get clear of other people’s fingerprints on her texts, allowing Plath to ‘fully narrate her own autobiography,’ as the editors here describe it, we will at last solve the riddle of her. The extremities of her poetry will balance against the circumstances of her life; the latter will equal the former. But her griefs were ordinary; it is what she did with them that wasn’t.
At 13, Plath wrote to her mother from summer camp nearly every day ... and told her she was happy over and over again, to the point that you wonder if she was ... It’s all cutely, earnestly all-American. We see her earnestness in political matters too ... The Sivvy voice of the letters has often been compared with the voice in her journals to make an argument about Plath’s unstable personality, but she often sounds like her journal self in her letters to her boyfriends, and the playful way she writes...is a relief after pages of carefully turned advertisement prose to her mother ... There is a moment in Tess of the D’Urbervilles when Hardy has Tess notice that among all the days of the year that mean something to her, there is one ‘which lay sly and unseen’, the one on which she’ll die: ‘Why did she not feel the chill of each yearly encounter with such a cold relation?’ Reading Plath’s letters, you feel the chill.
This vast collection of unexpurgated letters to friends and family is only half the story, and at a wrist-busting 1,424 pages it can’t comfortably be read in bed or bath or even held up. Faber should have provided a stand ... Some niggling textual decisions pitch this volume somewhere between the general reader and the academic ... This volume is as big as a bible and has the feel of Holy Writ, where every word is sacred. Did we need endless letters from summer camp, or the juvenile ones about stamp collecting? These deflect us from the poet rather than revealing her ... After more than 1,300 pages, it feels like the real story is just beginning.
...an extensive journal and carried on voluminous correspondence with a variety of family members, friends and business contacts. It has fallen to Plath experts Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil to gather Plath's correspondence into The Letters of Sylvia Plath, a collection so mammoth it will be published in two volumes. Often using vivid and compelling language, Plath addresses many topics in her letters - from politics and literature to her education and love life to her own unbridled literary ambitions and her plans to achieve them ...sheer quantity of the letters –– Volume 1 runs more than 1,400 pages –– is as impressive as their quality ... Engaging and revealing...a captivating look into the life and inner thinking of one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.
This whole complicated history is why it matters that scholarly versions of Plath’s autobiographical writing – her surviving letters and journals – are being published in their unabridged entirety by editors who are free from direct conflicts of interest. There is no question that The Letters of Sylvia Plath was worth publishing. The question of whether it is worth reading, however, is trickier … Though this volume is a valuable scholarly resource, most general readers are likely to prefer the second one, which will cover the years when the most dramatic events of her life (other than her suicide attempt at 20, which inspired The Bell Jar) took place. More important, it is when she came into her own as a writer and as an adult. Indeed volume two will have a better claim to represent the ‘true’ voice of the poet.
Readers may feel suffocated by Plath’s smarmy tone; what more can be said about a biography pored over for decades? But two ghosts haunt Volume I: Aurelia’s sanitized Letters Home (originally published in 1975), which purged allusions to her daughter’s fierce eroticism and emotional volatility, and Ted Hughes’ destruction of Plath’s late journals and ruthless editing of her work. Hence everything and the kitchen sink: The record must show all. And yet a nuanced imagination emerges from ad nauseam ramblings about term papers and tutorials, a rotating cast of boyfriends, as Plath riffs in the caustic vein that would make her famous. She confesses secrets and gossip to friends and pen pals and to Aurelia, always Aurelia.
I would go so far as to say that the unabridged nature of this book does Plath a disservice, encouraging even the ardent reader to skim for fear of one’s eyes glazing over at the mention of another frugal purchase or another lyrical description of the weather. Except that at some point—about 200 pages in—the close-up, almost microscopic focus began to exert its own fascination and I found myself caught up in the clean-cut, white-gloved ’50s atmospherics and the emerging facets of Plath’s complex character that together form her strong yet fragilely put-together identity … For anyone familiar with the ins and outs of Sylvia Plath’s life, these letters provide an added gloss to the known contours, tweaking her image without seriously revising it. There is, though, a certain thrill in reading along as Plath the dedicated artist hoves into view.
In this collection of letters, Sylvia Plath creates herself, narratively, stylistically, and imaginatively. The reward of reading through this long book is watching the process unfold, as Plath gains agency, self-confidence, and adeptness in her lifelong project of self-fashioning ... The Letters of Sylvia Plath makes clear that she crafted different versions of herself for different correspondents, variously including and occluding details about her experiences and shifting her tone and style, depending on whom she addressed. What truth we can find about her, therefore, arises from reading the whole volume and witnessing how Plath’s development as a person deeply intertwines with her increasing power, range, and stylistic control as a writer ... Reading through the letters to her mother, which Plath wrote at great length and with great frequency, is a slog, due to the monotony of cheerful affect and the obsessive recounting of what she did when, where, and how ... The pre-high school letters, many sent from Girl Scout camp, are especially tedious. Yet they reveal aspects of Plath’s character and style that carry over into adulthood ... The second half of the volume is therefore much more engaging than the first half. Plath’s increasing power as a writer, the variety of her responses to different correspondents, and her enthusiastic accounts of living in England and traveling on the Continent contrast to the sameness of her pre-breakdown letters to mom.
This scintillating and poignant autobiography in letters ends with their exultant marriage. For all of Plath’s published works and myriad inquiries into her relationship with Hughes and suicide at age 30, her letters blaze with fresh and stunning revelations, with more to come.
These letters alone serve to solidify her reputation as a skilled, thoughtful observer of the world and her own psyche ... his inaugural volume makes for a multifaceted portrait of a thoughtful young woman who might have gone on to even greater accomplishments than she did—and these, we learn here, extended to art and philately as well as literature ... A literary milestone: essential to any student of Plath’s work and, by extension, of modern literature.
...provides both a fascinating window into Plath’s life and a social history of the 1940s and ’50s as seen through white middle-class eyes ... Because they provide a largely distorted look at her troubled life, the letters deserve fuller annotation. Nevertheless, this is a valuable, significant addition to the body of Plath scholarship.
