
Plath's documentation of the two years the couple spent in the U.S.

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. Oh, he is here my black marauder oh hungry hungry. And I sit, spiderlike, waiting, here, home Penelope weaving webs of Webster, turning spindles of Tourneur. He is probably strutting the backs among crocuses now with seven Scandinavian mistresses. 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.

Her version of their relationship (dating is definitely not the appropriate term) is a necessary, and deeply painful, complement to Birthday Letters. 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. Kukil, supervisor of the Plath collection at Smith College. 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. Yet Plath kept journals from the age of 11 until her death at 30. 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.


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.
