In the decades that have followed Sylvia Plath's suicide in February 1963, much has been written and speculated about her life, most particularly about her marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes and her last months spent writing the stark, confessional poems that were to become Ariel. And the myths surrounding Plath have only been intensified by the strong grip her estate--managed by Hughes and his sister, Olwyn--had over the release of her work. Yet Plath kept journals from the age of 11 until her death at 30. Previously only available in a severely bowdlerized edition, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath have now been scrupulously transcribed (with every spelling mistake and grammatical error left intact) and annotated by Karen V. Kukil, supervisor of the Plath collection at Smith College.

The journals show the breathless adolescent obsessed with her burgeoning sexuality, the serious university student competing for the highest grades while engaging in the human merry-go-round of 1950s dating, the graduate year spent at Cambridge University where Plath encountered Ted Hughes. Her version of their relationship (dating is definitely not the appropriate term) is a necessary, and deeply painful, complement to Birthday Letters. On March 10, 1956, Plath writes: Please let him come, and give me the resilience & guts to make him respect me, be interested, and not to throw myself at him with loudness or hysterical yelling; calmly, gently, easy baby easy. He is probably strutting the backs among crocuses now with seven Scandinavian mistresses. And I sit, spiderlike, waiting, here, home; Penelope weaving webs of Webster, turning spindles of Tourneur. Oh, he is here; my black marauder; oh hungry hungry. I am so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love: I am here; I wait; and he plays on the banks of the river Cam like a casual faun. Plath's documentation of the two years the couple spent in the U.S. teaching and writing explicitly highlights the dilemma of the late-1950s woman--still swaddled in expectations of domesticity, yet attempting to forge her own independent professional and personal life. This period also reveals in detail the therapy sessions in which Plath lets loose her antipathy for her mother and her grief at her father's death when she was 8--a contrast to the bright, all-American persona she presented to her mother in the correspondence that was published as Letters Home. The journals also feature some notable omissions. Plath understandably skirted over her breakdown and attempted suicide during the summer of 1953, though she was to anatomize the events minutely in her novel The Bell Jar.

Fragments of diaries exist after 1959, which saw the couple's return to England and rural retreat in Devon, the birth of their two children, and their separation in late 1962. An extended piece on the illness and death of an elderly neighbor during this period is particularly affecting and was later turned into the poem "Berck-Plage." Much has been made of the "lost diaries" that Plath kept until her suicide--one simply appears to have vanished, the other Hughes burned after her death. It would seem rapacious to wish for more details of her despair in her final days, however. It is crystallized in the poems that became Ariel, and this is what the voice of her journals ultimately send the reader back to. Sylvia Plath's life has for too long been obfuscated by anecdote, distorting her major contribution to 20th-century literature. As she wrote in "Kindness": "The blood jet is poetry. There is no stopping it." --Catherine Taylor


From Publishers Weekly
This book constitutes a literary event. Over 400 pages of never-before-published personal writings make this first comprehensive volume of Plath's journals and notes from 1950 to 1962 indispensable reading for both scholars and general readers interested in the poet. Plath's journals were previously published in 1982 and heavily censored by her husband, poet Ted Hughes. But even the diary entries that have been available to the public demand re-reading in the context of fresh materials. In the newly revealed writings, we see an even more complex, despairing psyche struggling to create in the face of powerful demons. Plath's intense bitterness towards her mother emerges in full force, particularly in her notes on her psychoanalysis by Ruth Beuscher in Boston from 1957 to 1959. Plath's writing is by turns raw, obsessive, brilliant and ironic. Her sensitivity about rejections from magazines, her struggle to establish a daily routine of reading and learning, and her ongoing attempts to ward off depression provide reminders of her drive and ambition, despite her feelings of inferiority with respect to her husband. This work constitutes an invaluable primary source as well as a thoroughly engrossing narrative whose omissions are sometimes as important as its inclusions. (There is, for example, surprisingly little on Plath's sudden marriage to Hughes.) Strong print media attention focusing on new revelations will drive early sales of this important work, and it should become a staple backlist title. Editor Kukil is assistant curator of rare books at Smith College, where Plath was an undergraduate and later a lecturer. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Plath's admirers should prepare themselves for another dose of her bitter medicine: Anchor Books has announced the U.S. publication of her "complete, uncensored journals." (This unabridged edition appeared first in England.) Judiciously and unobtrusively edited by curator Kukil, who oversees the Plath Collection at Smith College, the text includes the portions suppressed by Plath's husband, the poet Ted Hughes, now deceased, when he authorized an earlier American edition. About two-thirds of the writings, which cover the last years of Plath's fevered life, have not been available to the public previously. All of the difficulties and contradictions that made Plath a literary icon are contained in these intense, confessional revelations, including her anger, egotism, frustrations, self-destructiveness, and passionate need to express herself. Certain to generate dozens of new academic papers, this is essential for anyone engaged in Plath studies.DCarol A. McAllister, Coll. of William & Mary Lib., Williamsburg, VA Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Plath kept a journal for most of her sadly shortened life, recording every nuance of feeling and thought with wit, passion, and despair, singlemindedly pursuing literary mastery. Her late husband, the poet Ted Hughes, began preparing Plath's journals, excepting those he destroyed after her suicide, for unexpurgated publication, a project now brought to fruition in a volume that enables readers to immerse themselves in Plath's gorgeous, ever-turbulent inner sea. The first journal begins in 1950, when Plath leaves home to attend Smith College, and the last covers her final months in England, and what is most striking about Plath's torrential accounting of herself is the naturalness with which she writes pointillistic yet animated descriptions of both exterior and interior worlds, describing her sensuality, extreme sensitivity, and increasing hopelessness. In early entries, Plath laments her unfulfilled sexual desire yet worries, presciently, that love, marriage, and children would interfere with her art. Life did prove too much for her, but what astonishing power coursed through her, and how much life she projected onto the page, into the future. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
From reviews of the British edition:

"A literary event...The book has a raw immediacy that will only add to Plath's iconic reputation." -Harpers & Queens

"The journals are cause for celebration...Given the intensity and rawness of their writing, at moments it feels like walking straight into someone else's dream."-Jacqueline Rose


Review
From reviews of the British edition:

"A literary event...The book has a raw immediacy that will only add to Plath's iconic reputation." -Harpers & Queens

"The journals are cause for celebration...Given the intensity and rawness of their writing, at moments it feels like walking straight into someone else's dream."-Jacqueline Rose


Book Description
First U.S. Publication

A major literary event--the complete, uncensored journals of Sylvia Plath, published in their entirety for the first time.

Sylvia Plath's journals were originally published in 1982 in a heavily abridged version authorized by Plath's husband, Ted Hughes. This new edition is an exact and complete transcription of the diaries Plath kept during the last twelve years of her life. Sixty percent of the book is material that has never before been made public, more fully revealing the intensity of the poet's personal and literary struggles, and providing fresh insight into both her frequent desperation and the bravery with which she faced down her demons. The complete Journals of Sylvia Plath is essential reading for all who have been moved and fascinated by Plath's life and work.




From the Inside Flap
First U.S. Publication

A major literary event--the complete, uncensored journals of Sylvia Plath, published in their entirety for the first time.

Sylvia Plath's journals were originally published in 1982 in a heavily abridged version authorized by Plath's husband, Ted Hughes. This new edition is an exact and complete transcription of the diaries Plath kept during the last twelve years of her life. Sixty percent of the book is material that has never before been made public, more fully revealing the intensity of the poet's personal and literary struggles, and providing fresh insight into both her frequent desperation and the bravery with which she faced down her demons. The complete Journals of Sylvia Plath is essential reading for all who have been moved and fascinated by Plath's life and work.


About the Author
Karen V. Kukil is assistant curator of rare books at Smith College, with particular responsibility for supervising scholarly use of the Sylvia Plath Collection.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Our Review
The Silent Woman, in Her Own Words
Sylvia Plath is a shoo-in for anybody's shortlist of the most talented poets of the 20th century. Her 1966 collection, Ariel, continues to stun new generations of readers -- and her prose work, as the seminal semiautobiographical novel The Bell Jar demonstrates, is hardly far behind. Now The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath reveals her as a genius even in the off-hours; these pages throb with her fierce, pounding intensity, her uniquely incantatory cadences, and the searing flashes of brilliance from her uncannily insightful inner eye.

Plath's journals have been published before, but in a heavily abridged and problematic form. The 1982 Dial Press edition, directly authorized by Ted Hughes, Plath's husband, contains only 40 percent of the material collected here; its entries are interpolated with disturbingly reductive psychoanalytic explanatory assertions and, perhaps most troubling, riddled with the marks of perplexing and at times suspect omissions. These redactions and additions tamper with the intrinsic logic and integrity of Plath's writing, and together they exacerbate the iconization of Plath as a mysterious but misguided genius. Fortunately, these textual faults are eliminated in the new book. Editor Karen Kukil, an assistant curator of rare books at Smith College, where the journals are housed, has remained faithful to Plath's original words even to the extent of reproducing spelling errors and has all but limited her editorial comments to her meticulous notes. The frequent omissions within entries have been filled in, and whole regions of previously unpublished material -- including two manuscript notebooks written between 1957 and 1959 (which were only unsealed by Hughes shortly before his death in 1998) -- dramatically open up Plath's intimate world.

Plath is brutally honest in these pages. Interspersed with joyful descriptions of landscapes, friends, and even foods, entry after entry is an unshrinking act of the excoriation and exorcism of her perceived defects both as a person and as a writer. In a sense, this restored record is the central authorial act of her life; it is a kind of home base where Plath dreams up new projects, drums up the energy to undertake them, and exactingly judges her past achievements. Yet although this book will be compulsively appealing to Plath's readers, it will also be vitally compelling to anyone interested in the human soul and its predicaments. It is a rare, crystalline document of the struggle of a great and unflinching spirit.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Published in Their Entirety for the First Time, Sylvaia Plath's journals provide an intimate portrait of the writer who was to produce in the last seven months of her life some of the most extraordinary poems of the twentieth century. Faithfully transcribed from the twenty-three journals and journal fragments owned by Smith College, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath includes two journals that Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, unsealed just before his death in 1998.

A heavily abridged edition of Plath's diaries was published in 1982. Roughly two-thirds of this new unabridged edition is material that has never before been made public, revealing more fully the intensity of the poet's personal and literary struggles, and providing fresh insight into both her frequent desperation and the bravery with which she faced her demons. With its haunting, vibrant, and brutally honest prose, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath is essential reading for all who have been moved and fascinated by Plath's life and work.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

This book constitutes a literary event. Over 400 pages of never-before-published personal writings make this first comprehensive volume of Plath's journals and notes from 1950 to 1962 indispensable reading for both scholars and general readers interested in the poet. Plath's journals were previously published in 1982 and heavily censored by her husband, poet Ted Hughes. But even the diary entries that have been available to the public demand re-reading in the context of fresh materials. In the newly revealed writings, we see an even more complex, despairing psyche struggling to create in the face of powerful demons. Plath's intense bitterness towards her mother emerges in full force, particularly in her notes on her psychoanalysis by Ruth Beuscher in Boston from 1957 to 1959. Plath's writing is by turns raw, obsessive, brilliant and ironic. Her sensitivity about rejections from magazines, her struggle to establish a daily routine of reading and learning, and her ongoing attempts to ward off depression provide reminders of her drive and ambition, despite her feelings of inferiority with respect to her husband. This work constitutes an invaluable primary source as well as a thoroughly engrossing narrative whose omissions are sometimes as important as its inclusions. (There is, for example, surprisingly little on Plath's sudden marriage to Hughes.) Strong print media attention focusing on new revelations will drive early sales of this important work, and it should become a staple backlist title. Editor Kukil is assistant curator of rare books at Smith College, where Plath was an undergraduate and later a lecturer. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Plath's admirers should prepare themselves for another dose of her bitter medicine: Anchor Books has announced the U.S. publication of her "complete, uncensored journals." (This unabridged edition appeared first in England.) Judiciously and unobtrusively edited by curator Kukil, who oversees the Plath Collection at Smith College, the text includes the portions suppressed by Plath's husband, the poet Ted Hughes, now deceased, when he authorized an earlier American edition. About two-thirds of the writings, which cover the last years of Plath's fevered life, have not been available to the public previously. All of the difficulties and contradictions that made Plath a literary icon are contained in these intense, confessional revelations, including her anger, egotism, frustrations, self-destructiveness, and passionate need to express herself. Certain to generate dozens of new academic papers, this is essential for anyone engaged in Plath studies.--Carol A. McAllister, Coll. of William & Mary Lib., Williamsburg, VA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Moses - Salon

The publication of these journals is a watershed event. They allow us, for the first time, to see this dazzlingly, maddeningly fragmented woman as an integrated being...Perhaps the most exciting aspect of a close reading of Plath's journals is the thrill of watching the laboratory of her mind at work, watching her coax her raw materials toward their concentrated final form...Her ars poetica, not just brilliantly executed but brilliantly won despite unbelievable odds, leaps into focus in even more astonishing detail than ever before.

Economist

To read the deepest dreams and impulses of Sylvia Plath is to fall in love all over again, totally and uncritically.

Michiko Kakutani - New York Times