Sylvia Plath Letters

In these correspondences, after more than 55 years, we reveal new details about Plath's brilliant life in her writings that deal with melancholy and overwhelming passion. What fueled her literary talent is the reality of her suffering from depression throughout her life, the loss of her father as a child, and her conflicting feelings about her mother, who was also suffering from the same disease.

The deeper side of these emotions is related to her relationship with her husband, the poet Ted Howes, and her reactions and feelings to the imagination of her discovery of his love affair with his mistress Asia Weevil, the repercussions of his abandonment of her and their two children, her transformation from a state of denial to anger, then to submission and sad brokenness, and in the end to utter despair that led to suicide. However, at all these stages, she kept writing the letters that she had been doing since she was a child of ten, and most of them resembled daily reports to her mother, Aurelia Plath, and stopped at the last letter, when she was thirty, to her psychiatrist, days before she committed suicide.

Pages: 543