The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
by Sylvia Plath
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Book Summary Information
Author: Sylvia PlathEditor: Karen V. Kukil
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Unabridged
Published: 2000-10-17
ISBN: 0385720254
Number of pages: 768
Publisher: Anchor
Book Reviews of The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Book Review: Inside the Soul and Struggles of Sylvia Plath
Summary: 5 Stars
The literary genius known as Sylvia Plath has been, like many larger than life artists, unfairly maligned and stereotyped throughout the decades following her death in 1963. In many ways, both critics and readers tend to make her into something of a caricature: often either the angry, castrating feminist or the angst-ridden, tortured artist. Of course, Plath's life story is very compelling, enough to reach mythic, legendary proportions. Because of this, many are too hypnotized by the myth and fail to try and find the real, dimensional human being beneath all of that. In this staggering collection of Plath's unabridged journals (from 1950 to 1962), we get a chance to get closer to knowing that person. Mainly because Plath tells us her life in her own words.
The interesting aspect of these journals is how Plath's narrative style develops throughout them. During her college years at Smith, her writing --- although impressive and articulate --- seems somewhat stilted and self conscious, as if she is desperately reaching for a voice. After she graduates college and settles down with husband Ted Hughes, her writing takes on a new kind of rawness and immediacy. It is still stylized but much less stiff and more like a free flowing stream of consciousness (similar to Virginia Woolf, whom she constantly cites as a key reference and influence in these years). During this time, she suffers constantly from Writer's Block and insecurities about her creative talent. But she is also clearly ambitious and shows an indefatigable will to hone and express her talents. After these years, closer to the end of the book, it seems as if she has finally begun to make a breakthrough, speaking with a directness and palpable intensity that literally jumps off the pages. The most fascinating portion of this 'section' is when she is writing in response to her therapy sessions with longtime psychiatrist Ruth Beuscher. Here she faces her personal demons such as her unhealthy relationship with her mother and her father's death. Her insight and self knowledge are impressive and she details them with language and pathos that leaves you mesmerized.
These journals are a must read for fans of Sylvia Plath's work. They serve as a documentation of her artistic development as well as the gestations of some of her best known work (traces of ideas for "The Bell Jar" are scattered throughout the latter portion). They also give complexity to the image of Sylvia Plath. Yes, there are passages where she speaks about her depression, her anger, and self-destructive urges. But, there are also an equal amount of passages that depict a different side of her: where she describes her day-to-day routines and activities; where she gushes lovingly about her husband; where she seems joyful and full of hope. Something else paradoxical is how much anxiety Sylvia often has about her talents, her potential, her future. It may seem strange that someone so enormously talented could be insecure but it shows that no artist is immune to self-doubt, no matter how gifted they are. For that, I would also recommend this to any creative person (especially those who write) because Plath brilliantly describes the uncertainty that often accompanies creativity.
My only complaint is the editing. I understand that the editor wanted to remain as faithful to the original journals by cutting out as little as possible. But, as noble as her intentions were, this collection could've been trimmed somewhat, just for organization's sake.
Summary of The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
First U.S. PublicationA major literary event--the complete, uncensored journals of Sylvia Plath, published in their entirety for the first time.
Sylvia Plath's journals were originally published in 1982 in a heavily abridged version authorized by Plath's husband, Ted Hughes. This new edition is an exact and complete transcription of the diaries Plath kept during the last twelve years of her life. Sixty percent of the book is material that has never before been made public, more fully revealing the intensity of the poet's personal and literary struggles, and providing fresh insight into both her frequent desperation and the bravery with which she faced down her demons. The complete Journals of Sylvia Plath is essential reading for all who have been moved and fascinated by Plath's life and work.
In the decades that have followed Sylvia Plath's suicide in February 1963, much has been written and speculated about her life, most particularly about her marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes and her last months spent writing the stark, confessional poems that were to become Ariel. And the myths surrounding Plath have only been intensified by the strong grip her estate--managed by Hughes and his sister, Olwyn--had over the release of her work. Yet Plath kept journals from the age of 11 until her death at 30. Previously only available in a severely bowdlerized edition, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath have now been scrupulously transcribed (with every spelling mistake and grammatical error left intact) and annotated by Karen V. Kukil, supervisor of the Plath collection at Smith College.
The journals show the breathless adolescent obsessed with her burgeoning sexuality, the serious university student competing for the highest grades while engaging in the human merry-go-round of 1950s dating, the graduate year spent at Cambridge University where Plath encountered Ted Hughes. Her version of their relationship (dating is definitely not the appropriate term) is a necessary, and deeply painful, complement to Birthday Letters. On March 10, 1956, Plath writes:
Please let him come, and give me the resilience & guts to make him respect me, be interested, and not to throw myself at him with loudness or hysterical yelling; calmly, gently, easy baby easy. He is probably strutting the backs among crocuses now with seven Scandinavian mistresses. And I sit, spiderlike, waiting, here, home; Penelope weaving webs of Webster, turning spindles of Tourneur. Oh, he is here; my black marauder; oh hungry hungry. I am so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love: I am here; I wait; and he plays on the banks of the river Cam like a casual faun.Plath's documentation of the two years the couple spent in the U.S. teaching and writing explicitly highlights the dilemma of the late-1950s woman--still swaddled in expectations of domesticity, yet attempting to forge her own independent professional and personal life. This period also reveals in detail the therapy sessions in which Plath lets loose her antipathy for her mother and her grief at her father's death when she was 8--a contrast to the bright, all-American persona she presented to her mother in the correspondence that was published as Letters Home. The journals also feature some notable omissions. Plath understandably skirted over her breakdown and attempted suicide during the summer of 1953, though she was to anatomize the events minutely in her novel The Bell Jar.
Fragments of diaries exist after 1959, which saw the couple's return to England and rural retreat in Devon, the birth of their two children, and their separation in late 1962. An extended piece on the illness and death of an elderly neighbor during this period is particularly affecting and was later turned into the poem "Berck-Plage." Much has been made of the "lost diaries" that Plath kept until her suicide--one simply appears to have vanished, the other Hughes burned after her death. It would seem rapacious to wish for more details of her despair in her final days, however. It is crystallized in the poems that became Ariel, and this is what the voice of her journals ultimately send the reader back to. Sylvia Plath's life has for too long been obfuscated by anecdote, distorting her major contribution to 20th-century literature. As she wrote in "Kindness": "The blood jet is poetry. There is no stopping it." --Catherine Taylor
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