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Missing Pieces of Sylvia Plath

February, 2023, marks the 60th anniversary of the death of Sylvia Plath. Plath committed suicide one month after her seminal work The Bell Jar was published in the UK under the assumed name Victoria Lucas.

Only a few of her works appeared in print prior to her death. A handful of poems were published in magazines in the 1950s, and The Colossus and Other Poems in 1960.  Many of her writings were released later in the 1960s--Ariel and Uncollected Poems (1965)--as well as the 1970s--Fiesta Melons and Crossing the Water (1971), Winter Trees (1972), and Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977)--and the 1980s, including her collected poems in 1989 and selected poems in 1985.  Sylvia Plath bibliography - Wikipedia

 Her work and her personal correspondence and journals attract interest even today. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, spanning 1950 to 1962, was published in 2000. Some of her letters were published in 2017 and 2018, and one of her short stories appeared in 2019. Sylvia Plath | Biography, Poems, Books, Death, & Facts | Britannica

But many of her writings have gone missing. She reportedly destroyed some of her letters and work. The draft of her second novel, tentatively titled Double Exposure, was lost, according to her husband Ted Hughes, around 1970. He also destroyed one of her notebooks “because [he] did not want her children to have to read it,” and said another notebook had simply vanished. What Happened to Sylvia Plath’s Lost Novels? - Electric Literature

What if three of Plath’s notebooks suddenly turn up? And they are a rough, hand-written early version of The Bell Jar? What would happen to them? And who would decide? That is the subject of a 2022 novel by Lee Kravetz--The Last Confessions of Sylvia P.

The Last Confessions of Sylvia P.

Elton and Jay Jay Dyce find a dusty metal lock box in the attic of an abandoned Victorian house in Boston they are renovating in 2019. Inside are three spiral notebooks, one bearing the letters V and L across the top. The pages are covered with blocks of printed letters and sweeping handwriting, some words crossed out, others underscored or circled.

A master curator for the St. Ambrose Auction House scans the pages and realizes she is looking at an early draft or transcription of The Bell Jar. On the cover of one notebook are the initials of the pseudonym Plath used for the book’s first printing: Victoria Lucas. A careful review by Boston University Professor of Literature Nicholas Jacob confirms the find as “the only handwritten version of Sylvia’s novel in existence,” and he wonders: “How is it no one knows this version of the manuscript exists?”

Author Lee Kravetz answers that question, telling the story behind the notebooks from three perspectives: that of the curator Estee, fellow poet and Plath rival Boston Rhodes, and Plath’s psychiatrist Dr. Ruth Barnhouse--over three time periods--2019, 1958, and 1953.

Kravetz reimagines Robert Lowell’s weekly poetry workshop, which included Plath and other so-called Confessional Poets, and patterns Boston Rhodes after Plath rival Anne Sexton.

Kravetz builds on his training as a psychotherapist to fictionalize Plath’s time in McLean Hospital after a breakdown and suicide attempt in 1953 and adds perspective on the shift in psychiatry from traditional Freudian to more human-centered forms of therapy. And he notes the connection between mental disorder and art. In an interview for Literary Hub, he emphasized: “all the literature shows that there’s no link at all… except in the case of one diagnosis: Bipolar disorder! It’s no coincidence that a majority of the Confessional Poets, including Sylvia, shared this diagnosis.” Lee Kravetz on Sylvia Plath, 1950s Psychiatry, and Confessional Poets ‹ Literary Hub (lithub.com)

 While the notebooks in Confessions are wholly fictional, the possibility of finding heretofore lost or hidden manuscripts by Plath should come as no surprise. Her work often disappeared, whether by her own hand or those of Ted and his sister Olwyn Hughes who managed Plath’s estate after she died.

The Lost Manuscripts of Sylvia P.

Sylvia herself wanted to disguise or hide some of her work. Friends agreed that she did not want to affix her name as author of The Bell Jar when it was first published in 1963. She worried that the novel, which chronicled her breakdown in 1953 and included thinly veiled incidents involving her friends and family, would be painful to read, particularly for her mother. Sylvia Plath 'didn't want her mother to know she wrote The Bell Jar' | Sylvia Plath | The Guardian

The Bell Jar book by Sylvia Plath (thriftbooks.com)

Plath filled notebooks and covered loose sheets of paper with what her husband called the “day to day struggle with her warring selves,” and his sister Olwyn, executor of the Plath’s literary materials, acknowledged: “when you read her journals – there were some very dark things in there.” Interview: Olwyn Hughes, Sylvia Plath's literary executor | Sylvia Plath | The Guardian

While Hughes released the journals for publication in 1982, they were not complete. Portions of the journals were removed before publication, presumably at the request of Plath’s mother (Interview: Olwyn Hughes, Sylvia Plath's literary executor | Sylvia Plath | The Guardian).

Letters Home which collected Plath’s correspondence with her mother was first published in 1976 and rereleased in 1992. This compilation also was incomplete. It excluded letters or portions of letters that described Sylvia’s bouts of anger or complaints about her illness. Red Comet, Heather Clark, 2020.

  

Letters Home book by Sylvia Plath (thriftbooks.com)

Two other notebooks cover the last three years of her death, but neither is available. One was destroyed by Hughes, so, as he stated, Sylvia’s children would not have to read the ruminations it contained. The other just disappeared. (Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman, Annals of Biography, August 23 & 30, 1993 Issue)

Most notable is the absence of material involving Plath’s second novel. In the summer of 1962, Plath began work on a fictionalized account, similar to The Bell Jar, about an artist who discovers her husband has cheated on her with another woman. It’s known that Plath had completed a sizable portion of the book before her death, carrying the title Double Exposure. But those pages have vanished. The Mystery of Sylvia Plath's Lost Novel (thedailybeast.com)

Missing pages are just part of Plath’s legacy, it would seem. As Emily Van Duyne noted, “In the hunt for a deeper understanding of Sylvia Plath, things are always going missing.” Why Are We So Unwilling to Take Sylvia Plath at Her Word? ‹ Literary Hub (lithub.com)

Found or Stay Lost

In Confessions no one, including the heirs of Plath’s literary estate, has a claim on the notebooks because they were never listed as stolen by police.  While the books could be offered to a museum or other institution, a private auction is planned. Auctioning the books to the highest bidder is considered to be the best choice for the Dyce brothers who found them and the auction house that stands to gain a percentage of the sale as well as publicity. But that means the books will become trophies for a private buyer and kept away from scholars and the public, when, as Nicholas believes, “some things aren’t meant to belong to anybody.”

In the United States, the right to privacy is a personal right under common law and therefore ceases upon a person’s death. Writers may try to protect their privacy or the privacy of friends and family after their deaths, but their wishes are often ignored.

The poet Thom Gunn made it clear that he would not want his letters to be published after his death. Yet The Letters of Thom Gunn was published in March, 2022. George Orwell and T.S. Eliot did not want biographies to be written about them, yet more than 20 have been published about the authors. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, James Campbell notes a review of a Susan Sontag biography asking: ”Is it ever O.K. to violate the privacy that friends, dead or alive, assumed to be inviolate when they allowed you to know them?” Does a Great Writer Have a Private Life After Death? - WSJ

A play being performed at Raven Theatre in Chicago raises the issue of privacy in the digital age when a young man continues to face a damaging and often untrue digital footprint ten years after the fact. Home | Raven Theatre Chicago

Unlike residents of the European Union, the man is not able to have his personal information removed from search engine results. He and others in the United States do not have what EU has: the “right to be forgotten.” What is the right to be forgotten? | Right to erasure | Cloudflare

After death, there is no privacy, and today on the Internet, as the lead Raven Theatre actor in Right to be Forgotten says, “there is no starting over, because there is no forgetting.”

Sometimes, as Confessions explores, an author’s words are meant only for the eyes of a particular person or no one at all. Unfortunately, these words are not covered by a right to be forgotten.  

 

Sources:

Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman, Slyvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Vintage Books, 1993.

Edward Butscher, Sylvia Plath, Method and Madness, Schaffner Press, 1976.

Heather Clark, Red Comet, The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, Alfred A. Knopf, 2020.