Selected with a foreword by Maura Dooley





Sylvia Plath always knew that she wanted to be a writer and she always wrote. This unique gathering of excerpts from her journals, letters, poems and prose offers razor-sharp, inspiring, amusing and painful insights into what it means to commit to a writing life. Plath wants, above all, to be truthful and exact, whether unlocking a childhood memory, exulting in new landscapes and lives or squaring up to marriage and motherhood. She doesn't think poems 'should be all that chaste; and reaches past decorum and convention to capture her subject exactly with an astonishing image or phrase.





This is a book for writers as much as for readers, and for anyone wanting to understand how a commitment to craft, to precision and technique, to looking hard and seeing clearly, is what lays the foundations for work such as Plath's with all its radical genius and enduring emotional power.



Maura Dooley is an eminent poet, whose most recent collection is Five Fifty Five. She is professor emerita at Goldsmiths College, and has founded and directed a number of literature programmes including Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, literature events at the Southbank, and the Arvon Foundation at Lumb Bank.She has edited anthologies of love poetry, women's poetry and How Novelists Work.