The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1
1940-1956
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $35.99
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- $35.99
Publisher Description
“The Letters of Sylvia Plath underscores Plath’s jaw-dropping output, her rapid growth from merely talented to singular voice. . . . The result is a comprehensive portrait of the artist as a young woman, ardently — unnervingly — committed to literature and relationships.” —Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
The first volume in the definitive, complete collection of the letters of Sylvia Plath—most never before seen.
One of the most beloved poets of the modern age, Sylvia Plath continues to inspire and fascinate the literary world. While her renown as one of the twentieth century’s most influential poets is beyond dispute, Plath was also one of its most captivating correspondents. The Letters of Sylvia Plath is the breathtaking compendium of this prolific writer’s correspondence with more than 120 people, including family, friends, contemporaries, and colleagues.
The Letters of Sylvia Plath includes her correspondence from her years at Smith, her summer editorial internship in New York City, her time at Cambridge, her experiences touring Europe, and the early days of her marriage to Ted Hughes in 1956.
Most of the letters are previously unseen, including sixteen letters written by Plath to Hughes when they were apart after their honeymoon. This magnificent compendium also includes twenty-seven of Plath’s own elegant line drawings taken from the letters she sent to her friends and family, as well as twenty-two previously unpublished photographs.
This remarkable, collected edition of Plath’s letters is a work of immense scholarship and care, presenting a comprehensive and historically accurate text of the known and extant letters that she wrote. Intimate and revealing, this masterful compilation offers fans and scholars generous and unprecedented insight into the life of one of our most significant poets.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Completing the monumental task of collecting all of Plath's known and available letters, this volume goes from her 24th birthday in October 1956 to a week before her suicide, at age 30, in February 1963. Opening on a young writer determined to publish and a deliriously happy newlywed gushing about her husband, fellow poet Ted Hughes, the book follows Plath as she finishes her Fulbright at Cambridge; teaches for a year at her alma mater, Smith College; and then returns to England to settle into a country house in Devon. The collection is mordantly fascinating as it reveals a brilliant, complex woman trying to carve out her own time for writing in between secretarial tasks for her husband (she typed his manuscripts), caring for their two children, and housework. The book becomes downright agonizing after Hughes leaves her and Plath is left fighting "the return of my madness," even as she produces her best work, the poems comprising the collection Ariel, with a feeling of "writing in the blitz, bombs exploding all round." Unobtrusively edited and scrupulously footnoted, this set of letters is a dazzling literary achievement, capturing the tender beauty of Plath's richly lived, too short life.
