The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol 2: 1956–1963

"This may sound like evasion, but having read those letters to her psychiatrist, and those allegations about, for example, Ted Hughes’s behavior—what more is there to say or do? How can we ever know? Frieda Hughes addresses an impossible situation with grace and courage when she writes about her parents in the ‘Foreword’ to the second volume: “they are both flawed and impassioned human beings and I love them more for this.” For me, the important question is whether those letters should change the ways in which we read Plath’s work, and I’m not yet persuaded that they make any difference at all. They are, although many of the reviewers went straight for them because they’re the most obvious place to generate lurid exposés about the Hughes-Plath marriage. You know, I’m fascinated by that, because this hadn’t occurred to me before. People have remarked on how the Collected Poems begins in 1956, as if Hughes turns up and suddenly Plath starts writing poems that we need to pay attention to—a matter of cause and effect. When it comes to the letters themselves, like any of us, Plath adapts her manner to her audience. (This goes back to what I was saying about Letters Home .) ‘Who is Sylvia?’ She contains multitudes—with at least as many personae as there are correspondents. The Plath of Letters Home is vastly different from the Plath of the Beuscher letters, who is different again from the Plath writing to the Catholic priest Michael Carey (and sending him, of all poems, ‘Mary’s Song’!). She’s all these personae and more. “The media circus tends to forget that Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were more than a scholarly debate; they were real people who still have loved ones alive today” Through the divorce from Ted, the identity that Plath had created for herself crumbles away. In those last few letters, you can see her struggle as she tries to look for what’ll happen next, looking for the new identity. Can I do this again? Can I still perform the rebirth? She realises that no, actually, this time, she can’t do it. To quote ‘ The Moon and the Yew Tree ’: “I simply cannot see where there is to get to.”"