Letters Of Sylvia Plath - Volume 1 - Hardcover

Sylvia Plath was not only a great poet, she also forged some of the best prose of the 20th century . she wrote letters of extraordinary wit and vivacity. Their publication is a major literary event . Peter K Steinberg and Karen Kukil, the world's two leading Plath scholars, have executed their task with devotion . Hitherto unpublished letters offer a wealth of detail explaining the origins of [Plath's] poems. (The Times)

The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1, expertly edited by Karen V Kukil and Peter K Steinberg . offers a portrait of the artist as a young woman, in her own words. This collection is inspiring, humorous and varied, and challenges everything we thought we knew about Plath. (Maeve O'Brien Irish Times)

Expertly edited . these letters are by turns poignant, revelatory, banal, hilarious and self-absorbed, documenting as they do the changing moods, ambitions and intellectual and creative development of one of the 20th-century's most celebrated poets . While Plath's personality may resist definition, these letters serve as a step towards a greater understanding of one of our most compelling modern poets. (Andrew Wilson Evening Standard)

What resonates most is Plath's energy, passion and vitality . reading her letters is a journey into the mind of a literary icon. (Elizabeth Fitzherbert The Lady)

The publication of these complete letters offers more pieces in the puzzle of Plath's life . what the reader comes away with is a renewed sense of Plath's wonderfully powerful appetites, for literature, for love and, indeed, for food . And how hard she worked! That's no secret but it is striking to see over the course of more than 1,000 pages . [Plath's] life had so many facets - she called these letters "slices of myself" - but this aspect of her young life, her determination, is never less than inspiring for the reader privileged to see her correspondence so long after her death. (Erica Wagner New Statesman)

Part of the experience of reading these letters is to see Plath firmly in her own time . In her correspondence we find more of the writer she was without [Hughes], and the artist she could have been had she survived. (Sarah Ditum Spectator)

Sylvia Plath was not only a great poet, she also forged some of the best prose of the 20th century . she wrote letters of extraordinary wit and vivacity. Their publication is a major literary event . Peter K Steinberg and Karen Kukil, the world's two leading Plath scholars, have executed their task with devotion . Hitherto unpublished letters offer a wealth of detail explaining the origins of [Plath's] poems. (Jonathan Bate The Times)

The posthumous editing of a famous writer is rarely as simple as it might seem, but the case of Sylvia Plath is one of the most tangled and fraught in modern letters . This whole complicated history is why it matters that scholarly versions of Plath's autobiographical writing - her surviving letters and journals - are being published in their unabridged entirety by editors who are free from direct conflicts of interest. There is no question that The Letters of Sylvia Plath was worth publishing. (Sarah Churchwell Guardian Book of the Day)

This volume is a portrait of the artist as a young woman, a genre with very few examples . the letters are important in understanding Plath's evolution as an artist and the revolutionary era of women's poetry to which she belonged. (Elaine Showalter Literary Review)

The great pleasure of this magnificent edition is being able to follow the events of [Plath's] extraordinary life as they are unfolding, (Kathryn Hughes Mail on Sunday)

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). 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.