Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26865 in Books
• Published on: 1986-05-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Customer Reviews

An honest portrayl of a gifted writer's life
Plath's honest and emotional portrayl of life as a college girl struggling with the expectations upon her as a young published writer, the pressure of growing up, making friends and meeting boys combine in this amazing book of letters home. Fans of the Bell-Jar will not be dissapointed to learn Plath was as poetic in her personal letters as in her fiction. In her late teens she wrote "I write only because, There is a voice within me, That will not be still." Personally I always have and always will revere this voice and remain amazed that such a young girl could posess such a paradox of views swaying from the divinely romantic to the neurotically driven desire to fit in and yet to remain an artistically higher being. The mundane everyday is expressed with such intensity of feeling it is simply beauty in the form of words. Plath writes honestly without pretension and what remains in the readers mind is how normal and yet astounding she was as a person, a woman and a writer.

Intresting - her mother's editing more than anything
I was really fascinated by this book. The early letters particulary are brilliant, and help create a sylvia who is similar to many other girls. However, i was dissapointd in her mother's increasing evident censoring. The number of times that ... appeared made me become more intrested in what wasn't said. Nevertheless I did enjoy it, although readersbeware of what is omited.

A must read for any Plath fans
This book brings together the letters Sylvia Plath sent home between 1950 and 1963 (the year of her death) and is compiled and introduced by her mother, to whom the majority of the letters are addressed.

What is most striking about this collection is Plath's committment to writing and maintaining contact with her family while away at college and later, while living in England with her poet husband Ted Hughes. The collection shows that during some years she wrote to her mother on almost a daily basis, sharing every detail of her life.

There is a rare quality to Sylvia Plaths writing, which is also evident in her collected journals and that is her ability to write with sheer abandonment detailing her desires as well as her depression and insecurities particularly over her relationship with Hughes. The letters (as well as her journals) then are both raw and honest and really allow the reader an insight into a troubed and complicated mind.

Some of the later letters seem to be attempting to reassure her mother, particularly after the break up of her marriage, that she is well and coping but also cause the reader to question whether or not these are just eveidence of her severe depression, in which she suffered bouts of happiness and positivity followed by periods of deep sadness.

This is a really interesting collection which gives us further insight into the awful downward spiral that lead Plath to committ suicide in early 1963, leaving behind her two small children. Poigniantly, her mother writes as the end of the letters "... some darker day than usual had temporarily made it [life] seem impossible to pursue." Which makes you realise how long her struggle with depression had been building and this is also the impression we get from reading her letters.

In our culture we tend to mythologize writers like Plath who have died young, particularly if that death is a result of suicide. It seems there is no figure more captivating than the 'tortured artist' but there is no better evidence or tool by which we can start to understand Plath than by reading her own writings so i would highly recommend this collection to any Plath fan or anyone who just wants to know more about a great writer. Read it and make up your own mind.