"The arrival of the collected letters of Sylvia Plath – this is only volume one; a second will follow next year – provides something of an object lesson in the weird desperation involved in what we might call heritage publishing. Of course we understand that Faber (and in the US, Harper) is thrilled to have this long-dead poetic genius on its list; such pride isn’t misplaced. But whether this means that every word Plath ever wrote, up to and including her scholarship applications, is of interest to anyone other than truffling biographers and PhD students is another matter altogether. Lugging around this rusty anchor of a book – it runs to more than 1,400 pages – what I felt mostly was exasperation. The notion that Plath’s every utterance is sacred would be dumb even if she ranked with Keats or Waugh as one of the truly great letter writers. The fact that she clearly doesn’t – the majority of those in this volume, written to her mother, Aurelia, are marked by their quotidian sameyness – only makes it seem the more vacuous. ..."
Guardian
New Yorker: The Letters of Sylvia Plath and the Transformation of a Poet’s Voice
NY Times: Sylvia Plath’s Letters Reveal a Writer Split in Two
amazon
2008 February: Sylvia Plath, 2011 May: "Daddy" (Video), 2017 July: Ariel (1965)
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