The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

What the 1982 edition left out

Ted Hughes inherited Sylvia Plath's papers when she died in 1963. Before he sold her remaining manuscripts to Smith College in 1981, he had the journals typed up. Jill Ker Conway, then president of Smith, arranged the purchase.

The Dial Press published The Journals of Sylvia Plath in New York in 1982. Frances McCullough was the editor and Ted Hughes the consulting editor. Frances McCullough worked from the typescript, not from the notebooks, and printed about a third of what Plath wrote. Jacqueline Rose, reviewing the full edition in 2000, recalled that the 1982 editor had spoken of removing the intimacies and the nasty bits.

The Smith College exhibition on the journals notes that Ted Hughes has been criticised for editing his wife's journals selectively. The charge is that his cuts left a dark, unbalanced and inaccurate record of her life. Karen V. Kukil made a similar point about what was lost. The 1982 selection kept most of the big events and most of Plath's thoughts about writing, but dropped the ordinary days, the funny passages and much of her best description.

The sealed journals

Two of the journals, written between 1957 and 1959, were sealed by Ted Hughes until 2013, fifty years after Plath's death. They include the notes Plath kept on her sessions with her therapist, Ruth Beuscher, in Boston.

On 14 September 1998 Ted Hughes unsealed them and allowed Karen V. Kukil to transcribe them, on the understanding that every original journal would be open to the public once the book came out. He died at home six weeks later, on 28 October 1998. Work on the transcription began that same September, on 933 manuscript pages.

The therapy notes open on three pages typed on pink Smith memorandum paper. In them Plath writes about the double standard of the 1950s, about her own behaviour, and about her mother. Part of the passage is written in her mother's imagined voice, asking where her nice girl went.

The same notes connect straight to The Bell Jar. Plath records that her mother gave her a book called The Case for Chastity. In the novel, Esther Greenwood's mother hands her a Reader's Digest article called In Defense of Chastity.

Paris in the journals

Paris comes into the journals during Plath's Fulbright year at Cambridge. She spent the New Year of 1955 to 1956 in France with Richard Sassoon, an American she had loved since her Smith years, and wrote a New Year's Eve entry there.

In the spring vacation of 1956 she went back to Paris to find Richard Sassoon and learned that he had left. She stayed on anyway. Julia Gordon-Bramer notes that she spent those weeks mourning him, unsettled by Ted Hughes, and seeing an old boyfriend from America, Gordon Lameyer. Her letters and journals are the main record of the visit.

She came back in June 1956 with Ted Hughes, whom she had married in London on 16 June, at the start of their honeymoon. Plath drew while she was in France that year. Karen V. Kukil points to the page where she says she was learning Paris through the fiber of her hand.

From Paris the couple went on to Spain for the summer. The journals follow them to Benidorm, with live rabbits in cages at the market and a rabbit stew Plath cooked for Ted Hughes's twenty-sixth birthday on 17 August 1956. Smith College keeps a photograph of the two of them in Paris that August, taken by Plath's brother, Warren Plath.

A writer's notebook

Much of the new material is Plath planning fiction. Luke Ferretter counted plot outlines for four short stories she finished that are now lost or survive only in scraps. He counted outlines for eighteen more that she never finished.

The longest outline, from May 1959, is for a story about a lonely bank clerk called Emmett Hummel. Plath told herself to begin it and never did. In 1959 she also resolved to write a novel about a college girl's suicide, the subject The Bell Jar later took up.

The journals are also where she practised describing things. At Yaddo, the artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she and Ted Hughes spent nearly three months in 1959, she described two woodpeckers in the tall pines. Karen V. Kukil calls Plath's account of giving birth to her son Nicholas at home in 1962 some of her most powerful prose.

The index is a research tool in its own right. Karen V. Kukil identified the books, songs and places Plath mentions without naming them herself. She also broke Plath's own life into entries such as her clothes, her cooking and the Smith College buildings she wrote about.