The Journals of Sylvia Plath

The Journals of Sylvia Plath offers an intimate portrait of the author of the extraordinary poems for which Plath is so widely loved, but it is also characterized by a prose of vigorous immediacy which places it alongside The Bell Jar as a work of literature. These exact and complete transcriptions of the journals kept by Plath for the last twelve years of her life - covering her marriage to Ted Hughes and her struggle with depression - are a key source for the poems which make up her collections Ariel and The Colossus.

'Everything that passes before her eyes travels down from brain to pen with shattering clarity - 1950s New England, pre-co-ed Cambridge, pre-mass tourism Benidorm, where she and Hughes honeymooned, the birth of her son Nicholas in Devon in 1962. These and other passages are so graphic that you look up from the page surprised to find yourself back in the here and now . . . The struggle of self with self makes the Journals compelling and unique.' John Carey, Sunday Times



Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at Smith College. In 1955 she went to Cambridge University on a Fulbright scholarship, where she met and later married Ted Hughes. She published one collection of poems in her lifetime,

The Colossus (1960), and a novel,

The Bell Jar (1963);

Ariel was published posthumously in 1965. Her

Collected Poems, which contains her poetry written from 1956 until her death, was published in 1981 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.