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The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 2
Author(s): Sylvia Plath

“A scintillating and poignant autobiography in letters. . . . Her letters blaze with fresh and stunning revelations, with more to come.”Booklist on The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 1

One of Kirkuss best books of 2018

The second volume in the definitive, complete collection of the letters of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Sylvia Plath, from the early years of her marriage to Ted Hughes to the final days leading to her suicide in 1963, many never before seen.

One of the most talented and beloved poets, Sylvia Plath continues to fascinate and inspire the modern literary imagination. The tragedy of her untimely death at age thirty, almost fifty-five years ago, has left much unknown about her creative and personal life. In this remarkable second volume of the iconic poet and writers collected letters, the full range of Plaths ambitions, talents, fears, and perspective is made visible through her own powerful words.

As engaging as they are revealing, these remarkable letters cover the years from 1957 to 1963. They detail the last six tumultuous and prolific years of her life, covering her marriage to Ted Hughes, the births of her children Frieda and Nicholas, her early success, including the publication of the classic The Bell Jar, and her ongoing struggle with depression.

The first compendium of its kind to include all of Plaths letters from this period, The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 2 offers an intimate portrait of the writing life and mind of one of the most celebrated poets in literary history.

Review(s):
As the marriage faltered, the masks fell awayPlath wrote honestly of her unhappiness and fearIn 14 recently uncovered letters to the psychiatrist whod treated her since her suicide attempt in college, we see Plath at her most vulnerable. It feels almost taboo to read these, so unabashed is her pain and humiliationBut in her final letters there was a note of wild, almost unbearable optimism. Inspiration ran like a tap; poems were pouring out of her. It seemed impossible that she would not make it.
The Plath we initially encounter in these letters seems very far from the person who, just a few years earlier, had attempted suicide with her mothers sleeping pills; and perhaps even farther from the person who, a few years later, gassed herself in her London kitchen. Above all, we see Plath on the move She comes off, most often, as a whirlwind its the alertness to daily life that makes Plaths letters most poignant. Few writers have been as intensely attentive to quotidian details as Plath was, or understood so intuitively what to preserve in their art. A detail appears, uneventful on its face, first in a journal or a drawing, then in a letter, sometimes more than one. Her mind was brilliantly off-kilter, its emphasis falling in surprising places.
Here is the more or less abrupt shedding, in extremis, of the stiff, artificial voice that infected her early poems and stories and from which she had been working to free herself for many years. The book provides, in the end, an account of an ordinary anguish out of which Plath produced something extraordinary.
An exemplary edition offering a textured portrait of an iconic poet.
This set of letters is a dazzling literary achievement, capturing the tender beauty of Plaths richly lived, too short life.
A shattering chronicle of a womans struggle to be both a pathbreaking artist and a domestic paragonTogether, these two volumes accentuate the wonder of all that Plath accomplished by age 30, and her poetry, fiction, journals, and letters will remain forever alive, daring, urgent, and electrifying.
In Plaths appeals to Beuscher she is plainly desperate for help, yet the rhythms of her sentences, her bitter humor, and the flamboyant performance of her plight reveal the artist at work as much as the woman in pain.

ISBN:9780062740588