When Plath died in 1963, she was virtually unknown as a writer. Unlike almost any other editor of Plath’s work, Kukil does not tell the reader what to think. Most importantly, this edition of the journals permits uncensored access to Plath’s personal notebooks. Kukil’s notes are clear and unfussy, and an extensive index (which I haven’t seen) promises further background information. The editor, Karen V Kukil, an assistant curator at Smith College, where the Plath archive is held, has also drawn together a mass of related material. Previously sealed journals, including notes on her private therapy with Ruth Beuscher, are published for the first time in their entirety. The source manuscripts cover her student years at Smith College and then at Newnham in Cambridge, her marriage to Ted Hughes, and their two years teaching and writing in New England. Her journals have never previously been published in the United Kingdom, and her publishers promise ‘an exact and complete transcription’. The loss of these notebooks is regrettable, but there is still plenty to delight the Plath enthusiast.

According to Ted Hughes, Plath’s husband and literary executor, the first of these ‘disappeared’ the second, containing entries for the final few months of Plath’s life, was destroyed by Hughes in order to protect her children.

Two notebooks are missing, from late 1959 to three days before Plath’s suicide in February 1963. This new edition publishes the journals that survive from the last twelve years of her life. Sylvia Plath began keeping a journal when she was eleven and continued until her death at the age of thirty.

The journals of sylvia plath