When I received a 1,078-page preview of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol. 2: 1956–1963 in PDF format, I was tempted to skip straight to the fourteen explosive, unreleased letters written by Plath to her therapist-turned-confidante, Dr. Ruth Tiffany Beuscher, between 1961 and 1963. Instead, I decided to begin with the introduction and read through the entire volume, showing immense self-control akin to the time I spent twelve days following a vegan diet.
Plath would not have been in favor of those twelve vegan days. The Letters are filled with passages like the one she wrote to her mother, Aurelia, in February 1960 during her first pregnancy with Ted Hughes, while they were residing in a flat in London: “I’m eating ravenously: lamb chops yesterday, new potatoes, escarole & lettuce salad with cheese & hardboiled eggs chopped in it.” Two years later, she recounted to multiple correspondents her shock at Hughes suggesting she “could economize by not [ … ] eating expensive meat.” This occurred shortly after Hughes left their marriage to pursue relationships with three other women and a bohemian lifestyle in London, leaving Plath to navigate life as a single mother.
It’s essential to note the specific wording, as it doesn’t state “how she would manage to live without Hughes,” a critical distinction in a world that often intertwines his name and narrative with Plath’s life and work. By the time their marriage unraveled, the couple had already embraced an unconventional lifestyle for over six years, working as freelance writers and shunning the traditional academic paths they believed would stifle their writing. Plath dedicates a significant portion of her letters post-Hughes to mapping out her novel-in-progress, the elusive Doubletake; managing her finances, calculating what Hughes owes for the support of her and their two children; and strategizing how to convince a nanny from the city to join them at their country house in Devon, England (“out here in the middle of nowhere, without TV, or entertainment”). She also contemplates a question that plagues many writers: “How I would like to be self-supporting in my writing!” she shares with Aurelia in January 1963. “But I need time.”
Aurelia Plath released heavily edited versions of some of her daughter’s letters in Letters Home (1975); one letter from 1962 includes the famous declaration that “I am a genius of a writer, I have it in me.” However, this statement doesn’t accurately capture her sentiments about her work during that period, ending with her tragic suicide on February 11, 1963. Leading up to this event and in the preceding years, she is seen fretting incessantly about her work and the financial returns it brings. Throughout her letters, Plath expresses the desire for financial independence, seemingly overlooking that she mostly achieved it. She bemoans the lack of writing time and success while concurrently fostering solid relationships with editors at the New Yorker, the Nation, and Poetry. In February 1960, as William Heinemann was about to publish her first book, The Colossus, she sends her editor, W. Roger Smith, a list of the poems previously published in magazines spanning three pages, including prestigious journals in America and Britain. “That about does it, I think,” she concludes. At the time, she was twenty-seven years old.
“Frieda is my response to the H-Bomb,” Plath writes to poet and friend Lynne Lawner in September 1960 regarding the birth of her first child. This statement signifies the birth of the Ariel voice: while the poems represent the myth, the letters post her discovery of Hughes’s infidelity reveal the backstory, serving as the liner notes to Plath’s poetic Back to Black. She exhibits raw humor—referring to Assia Wevill, the woman Hughes left her for, as “this Weavy Asshole”—without self-pity: “[Ted] says now he dimly thought this would either kill me or make me, and I think it might make me. And him too.” These expressions diverge sharply from portrayals of a Hughes-less Plath prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s, and even today, as hysterical and irrational.
The Plath depicted in her letters challenges this simplification. Besides confronting the aftermath of her failed marriage, she rediscovers her sensuality. In a letter to Dr. Beuscher in July 1962, post her awareness of Hughes’s infidelity, she conveys her reluctance to be “an unfucked wife.” A few months later, she informs her mother, “I am going to get a new black leather bag & gloves & shoes & just take my new things to London,” and “My haircut gives me such new confidence, truck drivers whistle & so on, it’s amazing.” This isn’t to say that she disregards her new reality completely. She oscillates between bewilderment at Hughes’s actions—”I loved the man I have lived with [ … ] but there is nothing of this left, there is only a cruel & indifferent stranger”—and sardonic commentary on her post-divorce life: “Dartmoor convicts keep escaping on these black nights & I keep an apple parer ready & the door bolted.”
Analyzing Plath without the overshadowing impact of her suicide has often felt daunting. Jonathan Bate, a scholar and Hughes biographer, pointed out in his review of this collection our tendency to “read [Plath’s] life backwards,” as if it commenced with her demise. I couldn’t help but recoil at the numerous references in her letters to turning thirty, the age at which she took her own life: “Life begins at 30!” she writes to her mother in 1962. And to W. Roger Smith: “After I have reached the ripe age of 30, I shall never mention it again.” Nevertheless, Plath wasn’t contemplating her suicide at this point or seeking sympathy for an ironic twist of fate. Quite similarly to many women approaching thirty, she cracks jokes, pondering when her youth and beauty might fade (“I am, by the way, not fat!!” she shares with Beuscher in 1962, evaluating her appearance post giving birth to two children in almost as many years).
The controversy surrounding Plath’s letters to Beuscher primarily revolves around allegations that Plath miscarried her second pregnancy after Hughes “physically beat [her]” (claims that Frieda Hughes, in her preface to this volume, more or less discredits, a moment that left me disheartened—seemingly, Plath cannot fully voice her experiences, even in a book comprising nearly 1000 pages of her words). Despite the distressing nature of these claims, they aren’t the most captivating aspect of the Beuscher letters, predominantly reinforcing existing stereotypes of Plath as a martyr-victim of dominant men. Instead, these letters hold value in showcasing an unguarded Plath, shedding the restrictions she imposes on herself while composing letters to her mother, which dominate both volumes.
The persistent idealization of Plath’s life is challenging to reconcile with the humorous, cranky, pragmatic woman who corresponds with Beuscher and other friends. While the Journals offer insight into Plath’s introspective voice, and her poems are esteemed works of art, the letters from her adult years allow a glimpse into her development of an outward, conversational voice. She discusses wanting to dye her hair purple, narrates mowing the lawn and dealing with taxes, and in the same breath refers to herself as a “sensitive & imaginative lay.” She consistently defends her decision to divorce her unfaithful husband against skeptical friends and family, articulating these arguments in a manner foreshadowing feminist theories like Hélène Cixous’s l’ecriture feminine. This calls for the expression of the body’s “unheard-of-songs,” exemplified in a letter to Beuscher in July 1962: “I have a feeling, when I try to look at what is I am sure my unique predicament [ … ] that [ … ] you [ … ] would say—let him go, let him get It out of his system. Well, what about my system? How do I get this other It out? This jealous retch, this body that comes, laughing, between my body & his body.” Even in books such as Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman, released almost three decades post-Plath’s death, Hughes and others continued to depict her divorce decision as “insanity,” perpetuating the belief that she was unhinged in both character and action. These letters represent Plath advocating for her sanity in real-time, reinforcing her enduring significance to feminism and literature.
