The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 2: 1956-1963 – A Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet's Intimate Correspondence on Marriage and Mental Health

Letters of Sylvia Plath #2

by Sylvia Plath

“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.” — Paul Alexander,  Washington Post The second volume in the definitive, complete collection of the letters of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Sylvia Plath, from the early years of her marriage to Ted Hughes to the final days leading to her suicide in 1963, many never before seen. One of the most talented and beloved poets, Sylvia Plath continues to fascinate and inspire the modern literary imagination. The tragedy of her untimely death at age thirty, almost fifty-five years ago, has left much unknown about her creative and personal life. In this remarkable second volume of the iconic poet and writer’s collected letters, the full range of Plath’s ambitions, talents, fears, and perspective is made visible through her own powerful words. As engaging as they are revealing, these remarkable letters cover the years from 1957 to 1963. They detail the last six tumultuous and prolific years of her life, covering her marriage to Ted Hughes, the births of her children Frieda and Nicholas, her early success, including the publication of the classic The Bell Jar , and her ongoing struggle with depression. The first compendium of its kind to include all of Plath’s letters from this period, The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 2 offers an intimate portrait of the writing life and mind of one of the most celebrated poets in literary history.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Poetry, Autobiography, Memoir, Classics, Biography Memoir

1088 pages, Hardcover

First published October 30, 2018

About the author

Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the most influential and emotionally powerful authors of the 20th century. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she demonstrated literary talent from an early age, publishing her first poem at the age of eight. Her early life was shaped by the death of her father, Otto Plath, when she was eight years old, a trauma that would profoundly influence her later work.
Plath attended Smith College, where she excelled academically but also struggled privately with depression. In 1953, she survived a suicide attempt, an experience she later fictionalized in her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. After recovering, she earned a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College, Cambridge, in England. While there, she met and married English poet Ted Hughes in 1956. Their relationship was passionate but tumultuous, with tensions exacerbated by personal differences and Hughes's infidelities.
Throughout her life, Plath sought to balance her ambitions as a writer with the demands of marriage and motherhood. She had two children with Hughes, Frieda and Nicholas, and continued to write prolifically. In 1960, her first poetry collection, The Colossus and Other Poems, was published in the United Kingdom. Although it received modest critical attention at the time, it laid the foundation for her distinctive voice—intensely personal, often exploring themes of death, rebirth, and female identity.
Plath's marriage unraveled in 1962, leading to a period of intense emotional turmoil but also extraordinary creative output. Living with her two children in London, she wrote many of the poems that would posthumously form Ariel, the collection that would cement her literary legacy. These works, filled with striking imagery and raw emotional force, displayed her ability to turn personal suffering into powerful art. Poems like "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" remain among her most famous, celebrated for their fierce honesty and technical brilliance.
In early 1963, following a deepening depression, Plath died by suicide at the age of 30. Her death shocked the literary world and sparked a lasting fascination with her life and work. The posthumous publication of Ariel in 1965, edited by Hughes, introduced Plath's later poetry to a wide audience and established her as a major figure in modern literature. Her novel The Bell Jar was also published under her own name shortly after her death, having initially appeared under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas."
Plath’s work is often classified within the genre of confessional poetry, a style that emphasizes personal and psychological experiences. Her fearless exploration of themes like mental illness, female oppression, and death has resonated with generations of readers and scholars. Over time, Plath has become a feminist icon, though her legacy is complex and occasionally controversial, especially in light of debates over Hughes's role in managing her literary estate and personal history.
Today, Sylvia Plath is remembered not only for her tragic personal story but also for her immense contributions to American and English literature. Her work continues to inspire writers, artists, and readers worldwide. Collections such as Ariel, Crossing the Water, and Winter Trees, as well as her journals and letters, offer deep insight into her creative mind. Sylvia Plath’s voice, marked by its intensity and emotional clarity, remains one of the most haunting and enduring in modern literature.

Reviews

[Roman Clodia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have found that the whole clue to my happiness is to have 4 to 5 hours perfectly free & uninterrupted to write in first thing in the morning - no phones, doorbells or baby. Then I come home in a wonderful temper and dispatch all the household jobs in no time

From the upbeat sunny letters of the early years following Plath's marriage when all is, allegedly, blissful through to the wrenching letters from the middle of 1962 when her marriage abruptly implodes, this volume provides the evidence to support epistolary theory: that letters are never neutral or innocent; that they are the sites of a dynamic self-fashioning; and that letter writing is a slippery, elastic mode that might be closer to fictional technique than we might think.

Continuing from where Volume I left off, we see Plath still writing to her mother with a frequency and attention to daily minutiae that astounds. The slippage comes at the 1962 flashpoint when the chasm in her marriage crashes open and, amidst the other emotional traumas, Plath's submerged feelings towards her mother pour out: not least her raging fear of being or turning into Aurelia. This has always been a subliminal anxiety but now the hostility becomes venomous as the Plath-Hughes marriage seems to replay - at least in Plath's mind - the troubled relationship of her parents.

Central, of course, is that breakdown of Plath's relationship with Hughes. With the alert eyes of hindsight, we can't help but shiver when we read of the unnamed Wevills coming to visit in Devon ('We have a nice young Canadian poet & his very attractive, intelligent wife coming down for this weekend - they're the ones who took over our lease for the London flat') but even so the speed and sheer cruelty of the crash is hideous to read about.

Controversially, Plath claims 'Ted beat me up physically a couple of days before my miscarriage', an accusation made only once and not repeated in the letters (which doesn't, of course, make it untrue) as well as 'the role of father terrifies him. He tells me now it was weakness that made him unable to tell me he did not want children.' It's hard to interpret what is going on here given Plath's earlier panegyrics on Hughes' paternal bond with Frieda and the way he shared the housework and childcare in order to allow her space to write, but truth, fiction or some mediated qualification on a spectrum between the two? Who knows?

I think what I'm saying is that these letters - indeed, all letters - cannot be decontextualised with safety. The spaces that open up between this correspondence, Plath's journals and Hughes' Birthday Letters (probably also Hughes' letters though I haven't read them) are filled with interrogation marks.

That said, Plath's voice is never less than brilliant in its fluency even when she is depressed, scared or furious. It's just not the same voice that we find in the journals or in the raging bitterness and bloody fury of Ariel. But the poignancy of nearing the end, of reading the final letter that Plath ever wrote is immense:

I am living on sleeping pills & nerve tonic... and poems very good but, I feel, written on the edge of madness.

[Carl Rollyson · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the February 2018 New Criterion I wrote that “Plath did not just love her brother Warren, as she reiterates in these letters, she impressed upon him how both of them were part of a family enterprise that their mother had established. This eighteenth-century sense of fealty is quite astounding and not quite like anything else you can read in the lives of modern American writers.” I called Volume l of Plath’s letters Pamela redux, since it seemed to Plath that her virtue had been rewarded, that a marriage to Ted Hughes fulfilled all of her aspirations as a woman, a mother, and a poet. She had held out for a hero commensurate with her high ambitions, and a man, she believed, as committed as she was to creating a large family. She wanted at least four children, she declared, and was still planning on having the next two when Hughes declared independence—no longer the home husband who had shared in the care of two-year-old Frieda and baby Nicholas. In the seven months leading to Plath’s suicide, when the estranged couple engaged in their tormented struggle to establish new lives for themselves, she continued to write home to her mother and implore Warren or his new wife to join her. She needed someone from home, and it could not be her overly protective mother. Plath did not want smothering in mother-love, which ironically, is part of what drove Hughes away, he said. He told her, Plath reported, that she was the “old womb.” His desertion devastated Plath not merely because he had been unfaithful with Assia Wevill but because he claimed never to have wanted children and had suffered their existence until he had reached a breaking point.

If Hughes was not exactly the seducer, Robert Lovelace, the villain in Samuel Richardson’s tragedy, Clarissa, he comes close to the character who makes volume 2 of Plath’s letters seem like Clarissa redux. For Richardson’s heroine is bound by a family content to see her conventionally married, and Lovelace, like Hughes, promises the heroine a richer and fulfilling life if she marries him. He spirits her away only to incarcerate her in a house of ill repute—not exactly the same as Court Green, the country home, Hughes was insistent on purchasing, but close enough in so far as Plath came to believe that he had turned her away from London, the city she loved, to become, in effect, his prisoner while he remained free to come and go—off to London and his ladies.

The comparison to Clarissa is not fanciful. Plath saw herself as a character in a novel. She was constantly projecting plots of what her life would come to, and she planned novels that were close to the bone of her own experience. Hughes, finally, felt he had to break out of her narrative, no longer feeling like the seducer but the seduced. He had first come to her in all her doubts, when she was recovering from the abandonment of what she called her “French lover,” Richard Sassoon. If Plath was more worldly than Clarissa Harlowe and no virgin, Plath nevertheless had the same virginal eagerness and trepidation about what her suitor portended. Like Lovelace, Hughes was “no common observer of what he had seen.” Indeed, Lovelace, like Hughes, “had a tolerable knack of writing and describing” which “showed him to be a person of reading, judgment, and taste.” These impressions are not Clarissa’s alone. They are what her sister and father have said, just as Plath’s mother and brother welcomed Hughes. And yet the Harlowes have “heard from time to time reports to his disadvantage with regard to morals.” As Plath, put it less delicately: She had been given to understand that Ted had been the biggest seducer in Cambridge before she met him, but that her moral example and diligence had helped to reform him.

If both volumes of Plath’s letters resemble a Samuel Richardson epistolary novel it is because so much of what happens is psychological, with a brew of feelings that the letters advert to rather than dramatize. In a Foreword, Frieda Hughes tries to make of the letters a different story. In describing her parents’ breakup, she concludes: “My father may have reacted to a perceived lack of freedom and had his affair, but culpability lay with both of them.” This just won’t do. “Perceived lack of freedom,” is a delicate way to put her father’s grievance against her mother. All through their marriage, he wrote as he liked, went to London and other places when he chose, and was accorded all due respect to his individuality. Plath had hoped he would cotton to America and stay there when she was offered a teaching position, but as soon as he made his complaints, they were off again to England, without one objection voiced in Plath’s letters or journals. Just as she acclimatized herself to London, he again expressed dissatisfaction and said he could only be content in a country home. Plath, who had come to adore the city, not only indulged his desires, she did so in celebratory fashion, throwing herself enthusiastically into Devon life, taking an interest in the locals that far exceeded his own. In what way, did Ted Hughes feel constrained? It is hard not to see from these letters that he wanted what is often called an “open marriage.” No wonder, then, that Plath seemed inordinately possessive, placing upon him a burden as the father-lover she writes about in letters to her therapist Ruth Beuscher, here published for the first time.

Plath was demanding, no doubt about it. But her demands derived from the compact she had made with Hughes, as two great poets bent on conquering the literary world. Plath had set them on this course by becoming not only a wife but agent and even secretary, typing her husband’s work. Without her, he would not have won his first prize and publisher. It is simply inconceivable that he would have matured as quickly or as successfully on his own. And she felt the same about her own work. She needed Hughes to challenge and inspire her, to take her away from mother and from the safe and complacent campus life she could have enjoyed at Smith College. He made her more daring. For six years—those covered in this volume—she had no reason to suppose that her vision of home, family, literary enterprise, and dynastic drive was different from his own. Perhaps she was inattentive to the signs of a restless husband. But he was her superman, and he did not speak up. Instead he slunk away and, as a result, left her with a void she found hard to fill, since no other man seemed to compare to the Ted Hughes she had been drawn to and then developed. But that was the problem, wasn’t it? He was her man, not his own. He could not fulfill her own heroic vision of him. A disappointed Plath realized he wanted to become something less than he was, feted by a series of women, beginning with Assia Wevill, who becomes in Plath’s imagination the femme fatale, the Lamia, who would ruin the man Plath had so strenuously supported.

Plath levels a number of charges in these letters that require sorting out. Assia can seem in her barren unworthiness (Plath keeps saying Wevill cannot conceive) a figment of the poet’s imagination. Wevill later conceived a child by Hughes but then destroyed it and herself in grief over his unwillingness to commit himself completely to. Her. Those who knew Wevill—like Al Alvarez spoke to me about her Plath obsession, sleeping in the poet’s bed and living among her affects. According to one of Wevill’s friends who spoke to me, men found her eroticism disturbing. She could cast a spell which, in one incident her friend described to me, one of her professors, the mildest of men, rose in rage when she sat next to him, calling her a bitch and walking out of her presence. That Assia was more than this incident and Plath’s letters reveal became evident in my correspondence with her loyal husband David Wevill, who did not leave her when the affair with Hughes began. Hughes’s own letters show, in turn, a respect for Wevill as man and poet and the difficult choice Assia had to make.

A raging Plath, reacting to Hughes departure from Court Green, shows Him in the blackest light, telling her he wishes her dead. He wants nothing to do with his son Nicholas—the usurper is what Hughes calls him, according to Plath. Even more troubling is Hughes’s violence, which Frieda in her Foreword tries to mitigate. Did her father really hit her mother, perhaps contributing to a miscarriage? she wonders. What really happened, she asks: “a physical beating? A push? A shove? A swipe?”

But what to make of Sylvia’s report of Ted striking his older sister Olwyn? This incident comes after Olwyn—nearly everyone’s villainess, including Frieda’s—calls Sylvia “Miss Plath” and, in effect, treats Plath as the usurper. Olwyn’s behavior, explains Ted’s mother to Plath, is due to her uncommon closeness to her brother, with whom she slept until they were respectively nine and seven. To Sylvia, brother and sister had a quasi-incestuous relationship. That Ted Hughes physically abused those he loved cannot be wished away with questions expressing doubt. More evidence may yet come to light, if a full account of what Hughes did is ever allowed.

I say allowed because lurking in the interstices of this volume is the widow, Carol Hughes, who refused permission to quote from Hughes’s comments often inserted into the letters Plath sent to others. With some frequency, the editors of Plath’s letters note that Hughes’s words are “not transcribed.” His voice, missing from this volume, only makes Plath’s view of him blacker, and why the Hughes estate—and that means Carol Hughes—thought it to her advantage not to include her husband’s comments is a mystery—part of her stubborn unwillingness to cooperate with Plath scholars and editors. She has adopted her husband malign view of biographers, much to the detriment of Plath and Hughes scholarship.

Just how badly Carol Hughes has served her husband is apparent in the Christopher Reid’s highly selective edition of Ted Hughes’s letters, which has a bearing on how we assess Plath’s letters. Reid was Hughes’s editor at Faber, and served, in effect, as an authorized biographer, whose words in the introduction of the letters are suspect: “My biggest debt of gratitude is to Carol Hughes, who asked me to edit this book. She has watched benignly and patiently over the entire operation, giving advice and encouragement, answering my innumerable questions and offering judgements, while leaving me unimpaired editorial freedom.” What this usually means is that the carefully chosen biographer or editor self-censors, careful, in this case, not to disturb the widow whose “judgements” he had to navigate. When Hughes biographer Jonathan Bate had a falling out with Carol Hughes, Faber forthwith canceled its contract with him.

We have no idea from Reid’s selections what may have been left out in Hughes’s letters about Plath, especially since he notes that three or four volumes of Hughes’s correspondence could be assembled. Even worse, Reid excerpts some of the letters, so that it is impossible to appreciate the full context of what he is saying. At a recent Plath conference in Belfast, Hughes scholars expressed envy at the Plath letters for their unexpurgated fullness and commented that they need complete editions of Hughes’s correspondence.

So a reviewer can only work with what Reid vouchsafes. For the period between July 9, 1962, when Plath learns of her husband’s infidelity, and February 11, 1963, when she takes her own life, Reid produces six letters. And this paltry selection includes two redacted letters, one written in December 1962, two months before Plath’s death, and another on February 10, the day before she died. Even with this meager allotment, we have some purchase on what to think of Plath’s epistolary version of events.

In a July 11 letter to Beuscher, Plath describes a brutal Ted Hughes writing off six years of marriage and saying: “How he wanted to experience everybody & everything, there was a monster in him, a dictator,” to which Plath appends “Und so weiter” (and so forth). In a letter to Olwyn (which Reid identifies only as “late summer 1962”) Hughes reported “About 2 months ago, just as the climax was arriving, I dreamed Hitler came to me, furious, demanding that I carry out the commands instantly.” What to make of this Reid does not know or is unwilling to say. But you can put to rest the image of an out of control Plath.

Olwyn had always indulged Ted. Only Sylvia had brought him up to the mark. And he could not abide her witness of his weakness—instead telling Olwyn about “the awful intimate interference that marriage is.” At the same time, he wrote to a newly married relative: “Marriage, of course, is a bloody monster, but it eats up many little snakes.” When Plath and Hughes took a trip to Ireland, where they hoped to sort out life after marriage, Hughes abrupt left here there without a word, telling Olwyn, “she knew more or less where I was.” More or less? He adds this wife comment on his wife: “You’re right, she’ll have to grow up—it won’t do her any harm.” His explanation of why had had to escape have their place in a science fiction novel when he notes “Sylvia’s particular death-ray quality.” For a moment, after her death, a remorseful Hughes took responsibility: “I was the one could have helped her, and the only one that couldn’t see that she really needed it this time. No doubt where the blame lies,” he wrote to friends in an updated letter shortly after Plath’s death. To Sylvia’s mother, on March 15, 1963, he wrote “But if there is an eternity, I am damned in it. Sylvia was one of the greatest truest spirits alive, and in her last months she became a great poet, and no other woman poet except Emily Dickinson can begin to be compared with her, and certainly no living American.” And so Lovelace after Clarissa’s death—in effect another suicide: ““a true heroine, whenever honour or virtue called for an exertion of spirit.” But ever afterward Hughes wobbled and spent his time supposing Plath’s father complex, an overbearing mother, a misalignment of the stars, and then biographers, feminists, and other assorted culprits were to blame more than himself. What mattered most was what they did to Sylvia and what she did to herself, with not much space remaining for his own culpability.

Plath’s last letter to Beuscher, February 4, 1963, and the last letter in this volume, written a week before the suicide acknowledges the accumulation of anxieties that Hughes enumerated that deprived Plath of her independence and identity. But there is still more to factor in. She mentions the “return of my madness, my paralysis,” expressed as a “panic & deepfreeze,” a despair that comes upon her as a “cold, accusing wind,” even as she tries to begin again, bothered by a “damned, self-induced freeze.” It was one of the coldest winters on record in Great Britain, and though biographers have mentioned as much in describing the poet along with two young children in a freezing flat, with mountains of snow outside and busted pipes. But they don’t quite get at just how much this sun seeking poet, forever seeking a tan, felt the cold close in on her. This second volume is filled with her complaints against the cold, exacerbated by the lack of central heating. In one especially vivid passage, during her first halcyon days with the towering Ted, she records, in a December 20, 1956 letter to her brother Warren, how her toes and fingers are turning blue, and how she feels like “taking a hatchet & going out like the old foolish knights to stay the Cold. I picture a transparent bluish villainous character with a blowtorch of ice, a north windy voice & numerous instruments of contracting torture.” Foolish, yes, she ultimately concluded, to dare combat the spectral menace that finally came for her, in a weakened state, some five years or so later.

[Theresa]

How can I rate this book? I feel like a voyeur, peering into someone else's very private life throughout her joys, triumphs, crushing pain, lost hopes. Farewell, brilliant Sylvia.

[camilavllr · Rating 5 out of 5]

estar en sus pensamientos es una cossssa

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a heavy experience for me. Heavy and miraculous and also just as frustrating as any attempt to glance at the end of Plath’s life.

I should first say, I’m one of *those* girls—the Plath obsessed. For a time, I thought I must be unique in my steadfast love of her: Plath shaped my whole life. That’s not an exaggeration. As a teenager, The Bell Jar saved me from suicide. I then moved onto anything I could read of hers, and it was the Ariel poems that ripped my world open and made me a poet, giving me permission to my rage. I studied at Cambridge because she did. I moved to Boston because she lived there. I read everything—every short story and letter. Every awful bio tainted by Olwyn Hughes. However, I’m not unusual: I’ve found through the years that I’m just one of many who fall into the net of Plath, who seek her as a spiritual mentor through a sexist world.

And so, here I am, at 40, and, I must confide, a dark time in my life (it’s 2020 and things are bad). I was nearly bowled over to discover the publication of newly found letters to her therapist, detailing the end of her marriage up until a few days before her death. With the Hughes finally out of the picture, these new letters, along with old unabridged letters have finally come to light.

I held this 1000 page tome in awe, dumbstruck that I would be able to live in a time in which new final words of Plath were unearthed, and I could feel that her full throated voice was going to come through: unhacked by the merciless red pen that sought to gaslight the female literary world for decades, protecting Hughes’ reputation.

And she is in it. Unquestionably, Plath is vulnerable, analytical, righteously angry, prideful, ashamed, sick and exhausted, and heartbroken.

But more than that: she is horrifyingly abused.

I believed Plath was abused. Her Ariel poems have a lot of violence, and, frankly, so does Hughes’ work. No doubt she was emotionally abused, but I believed it physical too.

And it was. Physical, emotional, financial, mental. Ted Hughes is a sociopath.

I should also say that though I believed in his abuse, I always offered him a measure of compassion, given that depression and suicidal ideation are complex things. But I do not have a single shred of compassion for him now.

In every way, what ted did was brutal. It went far beyond cheating, from daily beatings, to neglecting (and almost killing) their son, to purposefully withholding money from her and starving her and the children through horrible winters while she was ill with influenza, to forcing her to do every single bit of household labor—from child rearing to lawn mowing—he made her a domestic slave against her will. He told her she was faking fevers for pity, told her doctors that she was too mentally ill to be believed, and continued to beat her. All the while, he berated her looks and encouraged her to kill herself.

(This coming from a man who was so infantile and helpless that he didn’t even type or submit his own poems).

But before he deserted her, he made sure to completely isolate her in a country home, strapped with two tiny babies and no resources: he’d always planned to methodically ruin her life. I believe he knew her talent, and his narcissism had to crush her.

And it did. It blindsided her. She analyzes the relationship, however, with a cool head, angry about the abuse, eager to have her freedom and find herself, excited for her writing, excited to be social again, to be a whole person. She knows her poems are genius and going to make her name. In many parts, she sounds downright optimistic.

Until she doesn’t. And when she doesn’t, my heart just shattered. I took this book to the beach to nurse myself through the final letters, in which I just sobbed.

These are intimate and introspective letters of a woman desperate to save her own life, seeking out the one woman who’d saved it before. They are self critical, in places, but also self illuminating—she was honest to a fault, and until the end, even in hatred of Hughes, called him a genius writer and wished him good poems while hoping to be able to be friends with him, and even his mistress. Often, she’s certain of her talents. But she’s much less certain of being able to build a life on nothing but the meager generosity of her ex (who can withhold money at whim), especially as her income counts as his.

But she’s alone. She’s palpably lonely. And for me, having had decades of my life in my periphery that only could have happened because of her life, having been sucked so thoroughly into her orbit.....I felt as if someone was torturing someone I loved and I could do nothing but helplessly watch.

What I would give for Plath to have lived, for her other books, for the ability to tell her: you saved my life. I still look to you, my North Star. What I would give for her to see the throngs of women who have committed her poems to memory, who teach them, who maintain the legacy of the woman who changed the face of American poetry forever, who gave women the blueprint to rise from the ash, and lay claim to our rage.

The final letter will haunt me until my last day. I didn’t sleep well last night having read it. And, frankly, if you want answers about what happened between her and Ted that final day: you’re not getting it. We still only have Ted’s words (his unearthed papers in 2013) on that. And for a man so obsessed with portraying himself as the long suffering husband to a crazy lady, I can’t really put a lot of stock in him.

But we do get a glimpse at her mental state just before, and it’s not good. It’s a sudden, and shocking, downturn from months of optimism and hard work to rebuild her life. It’s brutal.

Plath’s letter writing skills, like all her writing, are keenly illuminating and self reflective. She’s nearly scientific at studying her faults and her talents. The book is a treasure, and a true miracle for those of us that feel her writing was stolen from us when ted torched her last book and journals. Like her whole life, Plath is a gift, and so is this collection.

But the gift is the same as the curse.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

From BBC Radio 4 - Book of the week:
A poignant, powerful autobiography in letters. Sylvia Plath's letters give us a privileged insight into her inner world, as a poet and as a person. This selection offers a fresh perspective on her as a writer as well as some stunning personal revelations.

This collection of the letters of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet cover the years 1956 and her marriage to the poet Ted Hughes to the final days leading to her death in 1963.

One of the most talented and beloved poets, Sylvia Plath continues to fascinate and inspire . The tragedy of her untimely death at age thirty, almost fifty-five years ago, has left much unknown about her creative and personal life. In this remarkable selection of correspondence , the full range of Plath’s ambitions, talents, fears, and inner world is revealed in her own powerful words.

The Letters of Sylvia Plath are read by Lydia Wilson and produced in Salford by Susan Roberts

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000...

[Joan Colby · Rating 5 out of 5]

1. . The letters in Vol. 2 which begin with Plath’s engagement to Hughes are more interesting than the juvenilia of Vol 1 though that presages her tenuous mental state. At Oxford, Plath is hopeful, joyous and upbeat about poetry, Ted and the future. Besides, poetry her interests are surprisingly domestic, following her marriage: interior decoration and cookery for example. A harbinger of bad things to come appears in Plath’s obsessive devotion to Ted—the perfect husband, talented, kindly, handsome, a fount of manly virtue—and her surety of a long and productive life together. Plath had no doubts of their mutual adoration and successful future which gives rise to what her mental state might be if the tiniest flaw ever appears. This sort of hubris almost demands to be challenged and one sees, from the outset, the makings of a Greek tragedy. After their marriage, Plath’s letters, especially to her mother, but to her brother and friends too, turn rather gushy and there’s a sense of emotional vampirism in her insistence on “both of us” “Ted and I” “Ted also” repeated constantly as to opinions and actions. No couple could be as conjoined mentally as Plath envisions—one could see how eventually Ted must have been wild to escape. There’s also a persistent note of control as Plath perpetually states how her mother should do things, how the future will play out in the slightest detail “Ted and I will naturally want to come down and be with you over Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter at least and Marion (her mother’s prospective house-mate) will then of course want to be with her family so that will be fine.” These self-satisfied assumptions dominate Plath’s correspondence as she directs how things will be to suit “Ted and I.” After stating her approval of “Aunt Marion” moving in, she continues “Both of us forbid you to ever let strangers rent the house under any circumstances, it would be intolerable.” Her mother apparently bends to every whim—one imagines she lives in fear of another of Plath’s breakdowns or suicide attempts—and she dutifully sends off pie-crust mixes, cookies, cold medicines and any item unavailable or not up to standards, to Plath at Cambridge. Plath repeatedly condemns England as cold and dirty and extols America as she plots to convince Ted to emigrate permanently and become a citizen, averring that he “loves” America, evidently based on her descriptions of a country he’s never been to. Plath revels in her picture of their life as the perfect couple, united in goals to be leading poets, and she is never so pleased as when they both have poems in the same issue of a top magazine. According to Plath, Ted has never had success in being published, nor a decent meal, until she, Plath, took over. Yet she is wary of trying to “push” Ted and counsels indirection as she convinces herself that she and Ted share every ambition, every small nuance of daily living arrangements. As time passes, and Plath becomes accustomed to Ted’s success as well as her own, she is more professional and adult in her reaction. Both writers have numerous poems in leading magazines, Ted’s first book wins a major prize and is a British book club selection. Plath becomes adept at sussing out the most lucrative venues for their work and applying for grants—Ted wins a Guggenheim which will give them a year to write in Europe—while Plath accepts part-time academic jobs and they both practice frugality so they can be full time writers rather than teachers. Plath spent a year teaching freshman English at Smith while Ted taught part-time at Amherst, experiences that codified their feelings that writing was their real vocation. Most enchanting are Plath’s letters describing their camping trip across the U.S. visiting the national parks such as the Apostle Islands, the Badlands, Yellowstone, Great Salt Lake and so forth. The couple have clearly settled into a comfortable relationship and support each other’s goals. They also have made many connections in the writing and publishing world with top writers and editors which will ensure their careers. Plath seems at the apex of her happiness following the birth of her first child, Frieda. Her delight in her daughter is palpable in her descriptions of the smiling, chuckling, blue-eyed little girl. She adds Ted’s pleasure in parenthood to her own and her innate urge toward domesticity is enhanced, including sewing little outfits, to her interest in cooking and decorating. She repeats her desire to own a larger home where they can have numerous children. Her picture of their life to come is nothing short of idyllic. Meanwhile, Ted seems occupied with his writing conducted in an upstairs room on loan from another tenant, and in his numerous meetings with writers, editors, doing BBC readings and staging plays. One can’t help but wonder if he doesn’t find Plath’s immersion in the domestic life to be a trifle wearying. She almost never mentions their passion as she once did. New fathers often resent their wives fascination with babies and nursing and how this affects their own sexual needs which may be put on the back burner. Plath is also detail-oriented as to their finances, sending all their checks for poems to her mother in America to be deposited in their bank account –its increase is of obvious importance to her as she hopes to find a “real house” and hints rather overtly to her mother that she’d appreciate monetary help in security a deposit. Seeing Plath’s happiness, one feels almost heartsick with the foreknowledge of what lies ahead. Both have books—Ted’s A Hawk in the Rain garners many awards while Plath hopes that her first book The Colossus published in England, will also be picked up by an American publisher. After many more successes, the birth of her second child Nicholas and acquisition of Court Green an ancient house on acreage in Devon, it seems that Plath’s dreams have all come true. Yet, there are disturbing signs in her letters as she mentions that Ted never interacts with their newborn son and how he is off to London frequently doing programs for BBC. In the summer of 1962, the worst comes to pass. Plath discovers that Ted is having an affair with Assia, the wife in the couple who sublet their London apartment. In her letters, the aspect of Ted changes drastically—her first impulse is to try to recapture his affection, but she learns he cannot be trusted. Either he lies or attacks her as wanting only her own happiness. He says he never wanted children, was too cowardly to admit he hated all that domesticity which he found stifling. He wavers back and forth between Plath and Assia, coming back to Court Green on weekends and then fighting with Sylvia. She confides the truth of their situation to Dr. Beuscher, her American psychiatrist who treated her during her breakdown in college and begs for help. Her letters to Beuscher, just recently released and approved for this book, by her daughter Frieda, paint quite a different picture of Ted. She feels he is a genius, the only man she could ever love. She deeply resents Assia and fears that others including her mother will gloat over the conclusion of Plath’s charmed life. In time, she realizes that the marriage is over and with Ted running through their funds on excursions with Assia, she obtains a legal separation to safeguard what monies are left and to require Ted to pay child support. She’s determined to make a life for herself, but her loneliness is unmistakable. She feels misled, that all the cooking and decorating and indulgence in children that she thought Ted appreciated and shared were simply a façade that he continued in part to take advantage of one of her grants which supported them, as well as the loans from both parents that made the purchase of Court
Green possible. Yet she found the prospect of remaining in the country suffocating and she relocated with the children to London. One of the bitterest winters in history then struck with power outages, a grim living situation, isolation and ultimately despair. During this period, Plath wrote the searing poems of Ariel which she felt would make her name. Her final letter to Dr. Beuscher shortly before her suicide ended with “I must take the children to tea.” Securing the children’s room so they would not be harmed, Plath taped up the kitchen doors and windows, turned on the gas and put her head in the oven. The possibility that she expected a nanny in the morning and thought she might be saved has been advanced but is purely hypothetical. The rest of the story is well-known—how Ted had a child with Assia who also committed suicide taking their daughter with her; his many affairs and his poetic success as he rose to be the most prominent British poet of his era. He was blamed by many for Sylvia’s death of which he never spoke—having burned her final journal supposedly to prevent the children from the pain of reading it. Before his death of cancer, he published Birthday Poems in which he both accepted some responsibility and also targeted Sylvia’s mental state as contributing to her untimely death. What a story. The editors wisely let the letters speak for themselves without commenting other than identifying persons when mentioned for the first time

[Diana · Rating 5 out of 5]

«(…) my own lack of center, of mature identity, is a great torment. I am aware of a cowardice in myself, a wanting to give up. If I could study, read, enjoy people on my own (…) But there is this damned, self-induced freeze. I am suddenly in agony, desperate, (…), I am incapable of being myself & loving myself.»

Letters that oscillate between joy, always in fragile balance, and despair. Simultaneously heart-wrenching and beautiful.

[paula · Rating 5 out of 5]

«Encima no tenía ni una mísera cosa que decir en el mundo literario; estaba estéril, vacía, no había vivido, era tonta y no había leído lo suficiente. Y cuanto más intentaba remediar la situación, más incapaz era de comprender UNA PALABRA de nuestro hermoso y antiguo idioma.

La única alternativa que era capaz de ver era pasar el resto de mi vida, una eternidad infernal, en un hospital psiquiátrico, e iba a hacer uso de mi último de libre ápice de libre albedrío y elegir un final rápido y limpio. Me imaginé que a largo plazo sería más piadoso y barato para mi familia; les estaba ahorrando que su hija favorita estuviese encarcelada de manera indefinida y carísima, en una celda de un psiquiátrico público, les estaba ahorrando la tristeza y desilusión de sesenta años de vacío mental, de miseria física.

Bueno, intenté ahogarme, pero no funcionó; el deseo por la vida, de algún modo, la vida física más que nada, es terriblemente fuerte y sentí que podía nadar sin fin, directa al mar y al sol y no ser capaz de tragar más que una o dos bocanadas de agua para después continuar nadando. El cuerpo es tremendamente cabezota cuando intenta sacrificarlo en pos de las arrolladoras instrucciones de la mente».

Desde que leí sus Diarios, sentía la necesidad de compenetrar aún más con Sylvia que mediante sus poemas, y por fin se me ha presentado la ocasión de leer toda su correspondencia.

Pese a que es una lectura muy íntima y muy personal, pienso que también hay mucho valor poético y literario, ya que a parte de apreciar su desarrollo literario, también se puede apreciar el enorme afán por huir del "desconocimiento", seguir escribiendo y escribiendo retándose a si misma y a las situaciones que la encadenaban.

He aprendido mucho de la vida y del mundo leyendo sus cartas.

[Dina Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

These letters shock, amuse, and finally break your heart. Expertly curated by Steinberg and Kulkil, they reveal the true Sylvia in her many guises: housewife, teacher, ambivalent daughter, loving mother, and tortured genius. They also vindicate my portrayal of Sylvia in ‘Capriccio: the Novel’ in which I show her as a flawed human being. Through the never before released letters to her psychiatrist we watch her descent into madness. Most powerful of all is the foreword by Sylvia’s daughter, Frieda Hughes. ‘My father was no saint’ she writes, ´but neither was my mother.’

[Flavia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inspiring and a testament to her genius. I knew how this volume would end, of course, but that didn't stop me from still hoping that somehow there was a mistake and she made it. Her letters are so full of life, plans, passion and literature that magically breathe life into Plath as poet, writer and woman. Ultimately, however, we are left with the resounding tragic silence of the 'what ifs.'

[Susan's Sweat Smells Like Literature · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant scholarship by the editors, Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil. Plath's voice was silenced or distorted for so many years by her husband and her mother. So pleased that she's finally being heard after more than half a century. As for the letters: Especially the later ones will rip your heart right out of your chest. I wished on every page after her traumatic summer of 1962 that I could travel back in a time machine.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harrowing and gutting.

[Stefania · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una gozada estas ediciones de las cartas de Sylvia, poder leer todas sus cartas y ver la evolución de su vida y de su personalidad.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

BOTW

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000...

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is the most important book of Plath’s to have been published since the uncensored journals came out in 2000. Central to the book’s importance are the newly discovered letters to her psychiatrist, the contents of which are explosive. Having ploughed my way through this voluminous tome, as a long standing fan of her writing I came to the realisation of what an unkind and unpleasant individual Plath really was. One can see why Ted Hughes and Aurelia Plath took such care to prevent from publication a lot of the caustic comments she made about not just themselves but various other people in order to make her more ‘palatable’ and thus marketable to the reading public. Even Plath exercised self-censorship during her own life time by publishing the Bell Jar under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas, as many of the portraits were acid attacks on people she knew. Her mother suffered a heart attack from the trauma of reading it. Undoubtedly these shrewd observations about people are what made her such a talented writer. However, the price she paid for this in her personal life speaks volumes. She seems to have unbridled contempt for most people. Few are left unscathed by her cutting remarks. English women are ‘pathetic - either blue stocking cows or butterflies with frivolous hectic accents’. The tenant in the flat above is a ‘pale, sick-looking runt’, childless unmarried women are deemed to be 'barren bitches’, her mother in law is ‘terribly lazy’, the local women in Devon are ‘amiable stump-warts’, the girls she teaches at Smith are ‘spoiled bitches’ and her long-suffering mother - who bent over backwards to ensure she had every opportunity in life - is a particular target of venom. Of course, the allegations of abuse by Ted Hughes have long been suspected and these letters serve merely to confirm them. He was never suspected of being a saint. But neither was Plath. Indeed, Hughes seems to have met his match in her, which no doubt explains why the marriage eventually imploded. He goes from being ‘the most wonderful man who ever lived’ to ‘a coward and a bastard’. She doesn’t seem to generally like women unless they can help her with the housework and childcare and only truly appears to value the company of men. Plath was no feminist. An intellectual and social snob, she declared: ‘we will have money, social position and belong to the aristocracy of practising artists’. The boys at the local secondary modern that Ted teaches at are ‘dumb….ignorant, marking time till they get trade jobs’. Her supportive midwife 'is sensible and kind but totally without imagination or much intelligence’. She complains of her in laws’ ‘working class Yorkshire miserliness’. She wanted to escape ‘cow country’ as the locals weren’t deemed intelligent enough for her or her children to associate with. Evidently, she wasn’t an easy person. She expected high standards from herself and other people, and to be a success in everything she did. However, although from reading this volume I find that I have less admiration for Plath as a person, I still admire and enjoy her writing.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

It has a lot about making sponge cake in it.

[False · Rating 3 out of 5]

Watch what you wish for, isn't that what they say? Sylvia got what she wanted...or did she? Starting in the Cambridge years when she met her future husband, poet Ted Hughes (and she stole him from an existing girlfriend) into the poverty but we're happy years. A trip over to meet the family after they marry, and a cross country trip through America. I know Sylvia had a troubled relationship with her widowed mother, but the letters show a woman martyring herself to her daughter and her talent. Juggling American bank accounts (to sidestep taxation) send me this, send me that--with every letter it was a list of demands: American diapers, Flako pie crust, bed linens, clothing, clothing, clothing. At times she lashed out at her mother in letters. Her mother, an educated woman, should have cut her dory loose and said, "Good luck." It seems she's most honest, and the truest voice when she is writing her former psychiatrist in New England, trying to find the answers to what her life has become, and what she can do to fix it, not seeming to acknowledge some things are unfixable. Her last letter was to this woman and the words, "The children are crying. And now I must take them to tea." In a foreward written by her daughter (her son committed suicide as a young adult), the daughter tells of the discovery of these personal letters when they went up to sale. There was debate to include them in this volume. I think they are the core of the book. They show a sad woman, a troubled woman, but a woman trying to find answers and give her goals. I watched the movie "Sylvia" after finishing this volume. Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia and her actress mother, Blythe Danner, as the mother. Daniel Craig as Ted Hughes. It was full of inaccuracies and was dreadful. Some things never even happened. Coming up, Ted Hughes' "Birthday Letters" his late poems before his death, trying to explain his relationship with Sylvia and his side of the story.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the first time, the last 6 or 8 months of Plath's life are narrated in her own words. Ted Hughes destroyed the last volume of her journal, but her letters went out into the world and there they stayed. The revelation here is her letters to her psychiatrist in Boston - while she was notoriously untruthful in letters before she was married, I definitely felt that her letters to her psychiatrist, seen here for the first time, were coming from her heart. Her daughter Frieda wrote a moving introduction centered on her first getting access to these letters 55 years after they were written. My overwhelming feeling as I read the letters from mid 1962 until the week before she died was that I wanted her to MAKE IT! She sounded more like a 1980s woman than a 1950s woman as she sorted through her feelings about getting divorced and what she wanted to do with her life and her children, not just being beaten down by Ted's rejection at all. And then just when she was feeling at her best, in her last letter she seemed to collapse and feel that she couldn't do it. I wanted to say NO! DON'T QUIT! YOU'RE ABOUT TO BE GREAT! YOUR KIDS NEED YOU! It totally changed my picture of what drove her to suicide, she had so clearly worked through the four stages of grief and had come to a defiant acceptance of her marriage and divorce, but she could feel things happening in her mind that she couldn't control. Nowadays she would have been able to take medication to help her over this, but I guess in 1963 there was only stuff like thorazine which would not have helped her function but just numbed her out. I imagine that her children would have had a slightly easier time of it if she had lived, given how much she loved them and how ambivalent Ted seemed to be about them. I totally recommend this book to anyone who's read about Plath over the years and somehow felt like there was something missing from what we knew. There is a sense of loss at the end, over what might have been.

[Gary Daly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sylvia Plath The letters Volume 2. What a read. I’m exhausted. This jumbo tome covering two volumes of Sylvia Plath’s letters shows the reader her life from 1940-1963. The letters takes the reader on an intense emotional and intellectual Pedra Branca, dumping and grubbing you through an intellectual and emotional maniacal reise. If you know Plath you know how the letters end. Sylvia Plath’s work leading up to her suicide in 1963 produced the intense and creative work that established her as a monument to the power and beauty of the creative individual.

From the perspective of the reader in me Plath’s death reverberates my own childhood experience of suicide. Self death leaves a hollow and frustrating vacuum. Its ripples irritates the collective admiration of the individual’s choice.

Volume two of the Letters of Sylvia Plath covers the years 1956-1963 and if you have or will (I recommend) like me read volume one as a companion piece to volume two you are in for the read of your life. When Sylvia Plath meets her symbolic mate for life. Her ‘one’ she develops an obsessional belief in the resolution of a self fulfilling ideal. Her letters tell us of Ted Hughes’ magnetic and mystical presence. Knowing the outcome of this disastrous love spoils the reader’s perception because we want to believe that Plath’s intense belief that this ‘love’ is her manifest destiny. The perils of self belief (delusion) and faith in the possibilities of the ‘other’ produce not only her tragic endgame but also the intellectual and creative explosion giving Plath in death everything she wanted from life.

Volume two (1956-1963) gives the reader respite in regards to length and makes up for that in delivery of emotional weight. I read this second volume believing in what Plath expressed. She had no doubts about her happy, productive and intellectually dynamic future. The love of motherhood, the goodness of marriage and and the bulging brilliance of her output all seemed tantalising possible. I read the final letters almost in the delusion that her looming death was poetically expressed. However he hard truth is ever present. When the end comes it was already written.

A beautiful and powerful addition to the reader who wants to explore the creative experience that is Sylvia Plath.

[esmé · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Sylvia Plath. I always have. Even before reading the Bell Jar - when all I knew of her writing were the fiery final lines of Lady Lazarus: “…and I eat men like air.” I sensed that there was a voice finally articulating the deep pains and joys of my own being. A sense that I had found someone talking back to me in the pages.

Sylvia gave me my voice. The way I write journal entries, poems, stories - it’s all in an attempt to emulate the wit and candour of Plaths style.

But you can’t talk about Plath without talking about her death. It’s what made her iconic. The oven, the cold London apartment, the two children sleeping next door, the cheating husband - suicide made an image for Sylvia. And for most people, this is all they will remember upon hearing her name.

I have been making my way through Plaths letters from 1940 all the way to her death in 1963. That’s about 2300 pages (give or take). I’m no stranger to Sylvia, having already devoured her poems, the bell jar, and all journal entries. But these letters allowed me to become even more intimate with the woman behind the words. Finishing these volumes was like farewelling a friend. It hurt. A lot.

But I am grateful that I was able to read this. That I am now able to remember Sylvia Plath as more than her death. Because she was so incredibly full of life. Sylvia is the little girl at summer camp - updating her mum on the weather and gossip. Sylvia is the student at Smith Uni - going to parties and biking down roads. Sylvia is the woman at Cape Cod - sailing and babysitting. She is at Oxford, and France, and Spain, and Devon - and in every word she wrote. The woman travelling with her new husband, birthing a daughter, a son.

And despite the tragedies that befell the last two years of her life - Sylvia never lost that spark inside her soul. Her incredible ability to weave together words. She is the poet who inspired my own words, and for that I am infinitely grateful.

I see you Sylvia, the world remembers you. Rest easily.

[Ramona Ezra · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was difficult to get through this book because as a reader, I knew what was going to happen, and I was dreading the last page. I did find it fascinating to read about the energy that Plath put into her life- getting Ted Hughes and herself published, having children, buying and maintaining a house, and making plans. Even near the end, she was vigorously trying to get better by meeting with people, getting work assignments, and making travel and work plans.

This volume includes 14 letters that Plath wrote to her psychiatrist. In one of them she accuses Hughes of beating her and causing a miscarriage. In the introduction, Frieda Hughes, her daughter, casts doubt on the phrasing that Plath uses and defends Hughes. This is natural- the early feminist movement did cast Hughes as a villain- but after a while, it gets exhausting to read. Everything that Plath says should not be dismissed or minimized just because she struggled with mental illness. This is not to say that Hughes was a monster or that Plath was a victim or a saint. We will never know exactly what happened because the two principals in the matter are no longer with us. However, second-guessing Plath's has become an industry in itself, and it's incredibly frustrating as a reader who should be able to just decide for themselves what happened.

This book is still a valuable insight into a time period that is not covered in Plath's journals-the reason being because Hughes lost one of her journals from that time and burnt the other one. Now, that's infuriating.

[Pauline Butcher Bird · Rating 4 out of 5]

Knowing the ending adds suspense to these letters through Sylvia’s idyllic early marriage when she and Ted Hughes stroll together in the countryside and write their poetry in impoverished houses and flats in Yorkshire and London. Perhaps as a forewarning, even in this happy time and during her pregnancy, Sylvia is taking sleeping pills and tranquilisers. Then the children are born and surprise, surprise everything changes. There are hints that Sylvia is a clinging wife to a now famous and adored husband, but then he begins an affair with another woman and it's heart-breaking. After becoming suicidal, Sylvia appears to cope and files for divorce. Happy in her new freedom and tiny apartment in London, she writes in her last letter that her madness has returned. The final line of that letter one week before she puts her head in the gas oven, reads: 'Now the babies are crying, I must take them out to tea.' The introduction by her daughter is equally moving.

[belljareads · Rating 5 out of 5]

The last letter just broke my fucking heart.
As a Plath 'fanatic' (meaning I admire her both as a person - driven, intelligent, committed, honest ... and as a writer), I recommend reading her correspondance which gives much insight into the development of her (too short) life in a very factual, day-to-day way, which is very different from reading her journals.
It's a commitment, for sure, but love and admiration will take you this far.
Being deprived of all the things she could have written if Hughes hadn't blown out her life in this way, putting her on the road towards a nervous breakdown and her suicide, her letters are a great "comfort" to read. To feel her presence.
But then again, as the years pass and even with the knowledge of how the correspondance will end, it just broke my heart. Shattered. She had so much to offer the world.
So much passion, discipline, genius.

... Anyway.
Read it.
Love her.
& Cherish what she managed to give us.

[Cristina Chițu · Rating 5 out of 5]

but both Ted and I realize the fatality is to stop writing: we would go on, daily, writing a few pages of drivel, until the juice came back, rather than stop, because the inertia built up is terrible to conquer. So for our “health” we write at least two hours a day.

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

I have an awful lot to distract me, and a legal separation may just set Ted whirling into this wonderful wonderful world where there are only tarts and no wives and only abortions and no babies and only hotels and no homes. Well bless him.

I want to be where no possessions remind me of the past & by the sea, which is for me the great healer.

[Mandy Jameson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection, nearly 1000 pages long, will mainly appeal to devotees like myself who are eager for any new insights into the lives of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

Sylvia's letters are at first full of joy at having found her 'wonderful' fellow poet and soulmate, then becoming mother to her two adored children Frieda and Nicholas while both she and (particularly) Hughes are starting to find success in their writing.

But knowing what's to come - her discovery of his affairs, the breakdown of the marriage and her ultimate suicide - makes the reading of these letters increasingly poignant.

By the final page I felt I had lost someone I'd come to know quite well.

[Brenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s taken me the better part of a year to read this, but I am glad I waited until I was in a good headspace. Reading her final letters was still devastating. (Volume 2 covers the years of her marriage to Ted Hughes, up until the week before her death.) Now that I have spent a fair amount of time reading both volumes, I can say that no other writer reflects my thoughts as well as Sylvia. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I would need to stop reading to journal about something she wrote. To read her letters is to affirm her existence as more than “the patron saint of weird literary girls.” This isn’t a book for the casual reader (it’s nearly 1,000 pages of letters), but it brings the person, not the poet, to life, and she is relatable in heartbreaking ways.

[Olivia Loving · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked up this book three years ago. And after three years, and many other books in between, I've finished. I've now read everything Plath ever wrote and published, and some things not published.

I think the delineation can really be marked when Plath utters her first "fucked" -- in a letter to Ruth Beuscher, I think. Her cultivated "cow life" persona falls away, and she begins making all sorts of connections -- some probably harmful and untrue, but you see her mind constructing the mythology that then carried on without her.

[Spinster · Rating 5 out of 5]

Far more interesting than the first volume of letters; this one has the good stuff. Let's not pretend her letters from girl scout camp are as interesting as what she wrote about her life in England. ANYWAY.

Marred, per usual, by Steinberg's stupid footnotes, the pedantic details about tangential characters in her life, but he was surely the best person to do the actual gathering and sorting of this woman's mail.

[Esther · Rating 4 out of 5]

Been gradually working through this over the past two months. Utterly fascinating. Offers much thought provoking detail and the final letters she writes to her psychiatrist are powerful, in that she was astutely aware of her situation, her failing mental health and capacity to cope. She had all that emotional intelligence but none of the modern tools to help pull herself out.