It was first published in Punch, two months after her death, and was later included in the collection Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. Plath wrote the essay America! America! just weeks before she killed herself, aged 30. Plath and Ted Hughes’s daughter, Frieda Hughes, has written a beautiful preface to this edition which details what it was like reading her mother’s last letters for the first time. In these dispatches, Plath is insightful about life as an abandoned mother with small children in a vulnerable situation, and she accounts for the series of events in clear, self-conscious and vivacious prose. They were published in 2018 as The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume 2: 1956-1963, edited by Karen V Kukil and Peter K Steinberg. Unassailable are the 14 letters Plath sent to her psychiatrist Ruth Beuscher during the last six months of her life, 1962 to 1963, which were uncovered in 2017 (previously having been privately owned).

The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume 2: 1956-1963, edited by Karen V Kukil and Peter K Steinberg Worth persevering with Her poems use language to drill into the deepest layers of consciousness, and occasionally makes the reader uncertain: what is the poem really about, what is really happening within its sphere? The Collected Poems offers a unique opportunity to spot the writer’s growth into a risk-taking poet who, step by step, pushed the limits of what is possible within the realms of literature.

Poetry was where she expanded her imagery, her address, her ethos and her dramatic self. The Bell Jar, the short stories and the dense prose of the journals aside – Plath was at her core a poet. The Bell Jar is a novel that teems with the contempt and self-loathing that flourishes in an oppressed girl’s heart. Esther Greenwood wants to go against the world view that aims to label her against her will she wants out of the shop window, to expand herself, become more, undress and throw her clothes into the New York night, not as a gesture of self-annihilation but one of omnipotence: “I am, I am, I am.” Esther Greenwood’s heart beats, in a perfect image of the self’s expansion through writing. It is about depression, suicide, female sexual liberation, hatred of one’s mother and traumatic electro-shock treatment in a world that lacks the language for what a girl goes through. The Bell Jar is an autobiographical account of being a young woman in the US of the 1950s, which transports a trojan horse up on stage when the reader least expects it and releases an entire cavalry of the taboo topics of the time. Yet she did write one, and it’s brilliant. Her entire writing life, Sylvia Plath scolded herself for not managing to write a novel.

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