Description:
Sylvia Plath's correspondence, addressed chiefly to her mother, from her time at Smith College in the early 1950s up to her suicide in London in February 1963. In addition to her capacity for domestic and writerly happiness, these letters also hint at her potential for deep despair.
Review Quotes: "The persona governing this correspondence beginning with her first letter mailed home as a freshman at Smith and ending with one mailed off about a week before her death is essentially that of a green and vulnerable girl, scarcely recognizable as the poet who wrote the pitiless, controlled rage of the Ariel poem....Perhaps because one knows from the outset how the 'story' will end, there is a pathos to "Letters Home "that disarms critical judgement....One is left willing to bestow on Sylvia Plath the compassion and charity she so relentlessly and fatally denied herself."--"Saturday Review""Finally now, young women writers can cease to identify with the apparent self-destroyer in Sylvia Plath and begin to understand the forces she had to reckon with. What comes across in these letters is a survivor, who knew that to be a writer means didcipline, indefatigable commitment, and passion for hard work. By no means all is told here, but the features emerge of a real, not a mythic, woman artist."--Adrienne Rich