The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath

Fiona Sampson at Literary Review:

The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath is an essential yet strangely discomforting volume. It includes writing so apparently far removed from the work for which Plath is remembered – her late poems and her autofictional novel The Bell Jar – that it almost seems to undermine her canonical status. In reality, of course, it does no such thing. Read alongside the works she’s famous for, it offers an insight into how young Sylvia became Sylvia Plath.

Those of us who admire or have been influenced by Plath already know her capacity for self-invention on the page. Peppy letters to her mother form the core of Letters Home, published by Aurelia Plath in 1975. Comprised of letters written between 1950 and 1963, the book opens with Plath’s arrival at Smith College on the eve of her eighteenth birthday and closes a week before her death in Primrose Hill. It’s hard to reconcile the eager good girl of these missives with the savagery of which the late, great poems show their writer to have been capable. There is a swinging of circle skirts and freshly shampooed hair, but the pressure to do immensely well – but not too well – haunts every page (‘Lisa told me about how it is good not to work too hard, but to allot time for “playing with the kids in the house”’).

more here.

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