Plath’s Unabridged Journals, published in America in fall 2000, and edited by Karen V. Paul Alexander’s Rough Magic contains a dramatic account of Hughes attempting to strangle Plath on their honeymoon in Benidorm, Spain-a grim tale supposedly told to the author by Aurelia Schober Plath, Sylvia’s mother, who allowed herself to be interviewed for the book. Ruth Barnhouse, Plath’s therapist-turned-confidante. In fact, the only way we can discount the certainty of that abuse is if we choose to disbelieve Plath at her repeated word in her journals, reports to friends and family, and now, it seems, letters to Dr.

To anyone as familiar as I am with Plath’s life and work, the fact that Ted Hughes was likely abusive-emotionally and physically-is not news. In the hunt for a deeper understanding of Sylvia Plath, things are always going missing. Materials from so-called “controversial” periods of Plath’s short life (she was barely 30 when she committed suicide in 1963), including her first suicide attempt and subsequent hospitalization in 1953, and the two years preceding her death have always been hard to come by, as Danuta Kean notes in her Guardian piece. Even, from time to time, by Hughes himself, who casually claims to have burned Plath’s journals from the last two years of her life, in his forward to the 1982 Journals of Sylvia Plath.

The letters had gone unread by any major Plath scholar through one of those black holes so common, and frustrating, to those of us who love her work.Įxamples of these holes are chronicled in various biographies and critical works on Plath: Diane Middlebrook’s Her Husband, the forward to Judith Kroll’s Chapters In A Mythology. OL5628775W Page_number_confidence 89.50 Pages 446 Partner Innodata Pdf_module_version 0.0.15 Ppi 360 Rcs_key 24143 Republisher_date 20211014012025 Republisher_operator Republisher_time 702 Scandate 20211011035623 Scanner Scanningcenter cebu Scribe3_search_catalog isbn Scribe3_search_id 9780306812996 Tts_version 4.Back in April, the Guardian dropped an apparent literary bombshell-new letters had been discovered from the poet Sylvia Plath, alleging horrific physical abuse at the hands of her husband, the British poet Ted Hughes. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 00:17:16 Boxid IA40258119 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

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