Why Read Plath's Letters?

Up today at The Guardian, Sarah Churchwell considers how the story of Sylvia Plath has been shaped by, first, Ted Hughes and then to a lesser extent by her mother, Aurelia Plath. Churchwell reminds us of Hughes's role as editor of Ariel, the Collected Poems, and then of Path's journals. In the 1970s, a volume of Plath's letters was edited by her mother and published as Letters Home. Ample ink has been spilled examining the story of Plath as it was shaped by Hughes, and Churchwell does a good job of providing a recap. Now, with the publication of the first volume of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, we may have Plath's story as told by the poet herself. Or do we? Let's dive in there:

From the beginning of her posthumous career this fusion – her reputation as a “confessional” poet – was used to denigrate her in notably sexist terms, as when Stephen Spender declared: “With Sylvia Plath, her femininity is that her hysteria comes completely out of herself”, which turned her poetry into a “witches’ brew”. George Steiner saw in her a “brokenness” that was “sharply feminine”. Her editor at the New Yorker said that her poems were better because “what their author threatened she performed, and her work gained an extra status of truth” – because she killed herself. That’s quite a standard to be held to.

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. Most of the letters in this first volume were written before Plath was 20. She was brilliant, but she was also a teenager in the conformist American 1940s and 50s, and most readers will not take much away from a 12-year-old’s gushing letters to her mother from summer camp, other than the poignancy of her eagerness to please.

This volume is complete, which completists will appreciate. But at 1,424 pages for volume one, it is not for the faint of heart. The editors claim that “this complete and unabridged edition of Sylvia Plath’s letters, prepared in two volumes, finally allows the author to fully narrate her own autobiography through correspondence with a combination of family, friends, and professional contacts”. This is certainly preferable to other people deciding which words of hers to share, as well as deciding to change them; but it is too simplistic to call the result an “autobiography”. Plath was a ruthless editor of her own writing, as her work on drafts of The Bell Jar and the Ariel poems makes clear. She would never have chosen to present an autobiography of herself as a gushing young thing – as caustic marginal comments she later made in her journals, mocking her own youthful effusions clearly demonstrate.

Continue the story yourself over at The Guardian.