Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #171316 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 768 pages

Customer Reviews

A truly fantastic book...
‘I think I am worthwhile just because I have optical nerves and can try to put down what they perceive. What a fool’

I ‘discovered’ Sylvia Plath while dusting down shelves in the second-hand bookstore where I worked. The blurb on the back of that book said something about her being married to Ted Hughes, and so I bought it using my employee discount...bought it because I knew that Ted Hughes was a Poet Laureate and reckoned he knew a good poet when he came across one………………ten years and a university education later I bought this unabridged volume of Sylvia Plath’s journals simply because in the intervening years I had found a voice in her work that I recognized and devoured… I, along with countless thousands – Sylvia Plath is now recognized as one of the most remarkable poets of the Twentieth century with her life and work being the subject of Hollywood movies, review articles and many, many books.

Edited by Karen V. Kukil, this volume contains material taken directly from original journals now housed at Smith College, Massachusetts where Plath began her student life in 1950. While unabridged the journals are by no means complete – they begin with entries from 1950, include two previously sealed journals for the first time and continue right up to fragments written just seven months before her death in 1963. However, the two complete journals she wrote in the last three years of her life are not included – one was destroyed by Ted Hughes after her death, the other has famously disappeared.

In this volume Plath’s wondrous, wondrous use of language and imagery to recount her daily life, musings, desires and fears leave you gasping at their sheer brilliancy. Even if you had never heard of her, and some pure chance had placed this book in your hands, you could not help, upon reading the first few pages, to be but enthralled by her startling intellect, her innate grasp of the powers of description as a tool to portray life.

The journals have been superbly supplemented in this volume by photographs throughout, and additional notes at the end giving details about people, places and events mentioned throughout the journals which, along with physical descriptions of the various notebooks and pages she used, make this volume a truly fantastic book.