The Journals of Sylvia Plath

By: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

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Synopsis: An exact and complete transcription of the journals kept by Sylvia Plath over the last twelve years of her life. Sylvia Plath kept a record of her life from the age of eleven until her death at thirty. The journals are characterized by the vigorous immediacy with which she records her inner thoughts and feelings and the intricacies of her daily life. Apart from being a key source for her early writing, they give us an intimate portrait of the writer who was to produce in the last seven months of her life the extraordinary poems which have secured her reputation as one of the greatest of twentieth century poets. Plath's adult years, from 1950 to 1962, are the focus of this edition, which includes an exact transcription of the twenty-three journals and journal fragments owned by Smith College. They offer a chronicle of her life: student days at Smith College; her time at Cambridge University where she met and later married the poet Ted Hughes; the two years spent working and living in New England; the couple's return to England and life in Devon, including the birth of their two children, before the marriage broke down in 1962.