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. Plath’s epistolary style is as vivid, powerful, and complex as her poetry, prose and journal writing. While her journal entries were frequently exercises in composition, her letters often dig out the caves behind each character and situation in her life. Plath kept the interests of her addressees in mind as she crafted her letters. As a result, her voice is as varied as the more than 1,390 letters in these volumes to her more than 140 correspondents.
Plath’s first letters to her parents were written in pencil in a cursive script. She often illustrated her early letters with drawings and flourishes in colour. Later letters were either written in black ink or typed on a variety of coloured papers, greeting cards and memorandum sheets.
Most of the original letters are held by the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, and the William Allan Neilson Library, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. Additional letters are dispersed among more than forty libraries and archives. Some letters are still in private collections.
Sylvia Plath was extremely well read and curious about all aspects of culture in the mid-twentieth century. As a result, the topics of her letters were wide-ranging, from the atomic bomb to W. B. Yeats. All phases of her development are documented in her correspondence. The most intimate details of her daily life were candidly described in letters to her mother from 1940 to 1963. (This correspondence, originally published in an abridged form by Aurelia Schober Plath as Letters Home, appears here in a complete transcription for the first time.) Plath wrote about early hobbies, such as stamp collecting, to one of her childhood friends, Margot Loungway Drekmeier. During high school, she explained the intricacies of American popular culture to a German pen pal, Hans-Joachim Neupert. There were many men in Plath’s life. To an early boyfriend, Philip McCurdy, she wrote about friendship as their romance waned. Later to some of her former Smith College roommates, such as Marcia Brown Plumer Stern, she wrote about her travels in Europe, marital relationships, motherhood, and domestic crafts. In the sixteen letters written to Ted Hughes shortly after their marriage and honeymoon, Plath described her courses and life in Cambridge. Her discussion of their poetry documents their extraordinary creative partnership. Plath’s business-related letters show a different side. Readers familiar with her journals will know she long sought publication in the New Yorker. Plath’s correspondence with several editors of the New Yorker demonstrates her efforts to satisfy concerns they had about lines, imagery, punctuation, and titles. Her submissions were not always accepted, but what arises is a healthy working relationship that routinely brought her poetry to publication. In addition to her literary development, the genesis of many poems, short stories, and novels is fully revealed in her letters. Her primary focus was always on her poetry, thrusting up from her ‘psychic ground root’.
Some memorable incidents from Plath’s life were recounted and enhanced multiple times in her letters and often found their way into her prose and poetry. She was so conscious of her audience that even when her experiences were repeated there were subtle variations of emphasis aimed to achieve a maximum response or reaction.
When Plath’s Letters Home was published in the United States in 1975 (and in the United Kingdom the following year), the edition was highly selected with unmarked editorial omissions, changes to Plath’s words, and incorrect dates assigned to some letters. Only 383 of 856 letters to her mother and family were partially published in Letters Home. By contrast, the goal of this edition of Plath’s letters is to present a complete and historically accurate text of all the known, existing letters to a full range of her correspondents. The transcriptions of the letters are as faithful to the author’s originals as possible. Plath’s final revisions are preserved and her substantive deletions and corrections are discussed in the footnotes. Plath’s spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and grammar, as well as her errors, have been carefully transcribed and are presented without editorial comment. Original layout and page breaks, however, are not duplicated. Incredibly frugal and conscientious of the limited space available to her, Plath wrote and typed to the very edges of her paper. This was especially the case when she wrote from England on blue aerogrammes. Occasionally, punctuation marks are not present in the original letters, but are implied by the start of a new sentence or paragraph. As a result, when Plath’s intention was clear, punctuation has been added to the letter without editorial comment.
Dates for undated letters were assigned from postmarks and/or internal and external evidence and are identified with a circa date (for example, to Ann Davidow-Goodman, c. Friday 12 January 1951). In some instances where dating a letter exactly proved too difficult or uncertain, we have offered either a range of days or simply the month or the year (for example, to Mademoiselle, c. February 1955 and to Edith & William Hughes, c. 1957). Locations of the original manuscripts are also included in the introductory header for each letter. Scans of selected drawings included in letters by Plath and photographs of her life are gathered together in the plates. Enclosures of early poems have been transcribed and included with the appropriate letter. Many of these photographs and poems have never been published.
Comprehensive factual and supporting footnotes are provided. These annotations aim to bring context to Plath’s life; her experiences, her publication history and that of Ted Hughes, cultural events, and her education and interests. Significant places, family, friends and professional contacts are identified at their first mention. Where possible, the footnotes supply referential information about the letters to which Plath was responding, as well as the locations for books from her personal library and papers written for her university courses. We made use of Plath’s early diaries, adult journals, scrapbooks, and personal calendars to offer additional biographical information in order to supply, for instance, dates of production for her creative writing.
An extensive index completes the publication and serves as an additional reference guide. The adult names of Plath’s female friends and acquaintances are used, but the index also includes cross references to their birth names and other married names.
As we read, edited, and annotated the letters initially available to us, we kept a running list of all the other letters Plath mentioned writing, which number more than 700. Some letters were destroyed, lost or not retained, such as those to Eddie Cohen and to boyfriends Richard Sassoon and Richard Norton. Other letters are presumed to remain in private hands, such as a postcard sent from McLean Hospital in December 1953, which was offered for sale at Sotheby’s in 1982. Plath wrote letters and notes to many other acquaintances, Smith classmates, publishers, teachers, and mentors, as well as to family friends. We attempted to contact many of these recipients; a majority of these requests went unanswered. Those who did respond yielded some positive results. After this edition of The Letters of Sylvia Plath is published, additional letters that are discovered may be gathered for subsequent publication.