[Ted Hughes inherited Plath’s manuscripts and copyrights when she died. He published Plath’s poetry (1965, 1981) and prose (1977) and a selection of her private journals (1982). While Aurelia Plath may have manipulated her daughter’s words to tell the story of a “good girl” in Letters Home, Hughes has been criticized for selectively editing his wife’s journals to create a dark, equally unbalanced and inaccurate record of her life.The unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962 were published in London in April 2000 with the full support of the Plath estate. They are a complete and faithful transcription of the manuscript journals owned by Smith College. They represent the first time that Plath has been allowed to speak for herself since her death in 1963. While over a hundred biographies and critical works have been written about Sylvia Plath, no scholar has been given free license by the Plath estate to interpret and liberally quote from her unpublished manuscripts.]
As a scholarly community, if we have the foresight to collect important documents about women’s lives and if we properly preserve these original manuscripts, the extraordinary story that they hold will one day be told. Copyrights protecting unpublished manuscripts currently lapse seventy years after the author's death.
(Typewriter owned by Sylvia Plath and Sylvia Plath with her typewriter)
(Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Annotated by Marcia Brown Stern. Note the underlined reference to Jody’s cheeks and the annotation in the margin. The character of Jody was based on Marcia)
Many of the women Plath met at college became her friends for life. This letter to her college roommate, Marcia Brown, was written a week before her death. Plath and Ted Hughes had separated the previous October. They were living at Court Green, a thatched manor house in Devonshire. Plath writes about her plans to make a life of her own in London with her two children, Frieda and Nicholas Hughes. Plath committed suicide in her London apartment on February 11, 1963
Sylvia Plath. Letter to Marcia Brown Plumer,
February 4, 1963
Photograph of Marcia Brown and Sylvia Plath, Marblehead, Mass,
July 24, 1951
