Special Collections > Mortimer Rare Book Collection > Online Exhibits > A Story of Their Own > Plath's Published Journals
Plath's Published Journals
Sylvia Plath. The Journals of
Sylvia Plath. Ted Hughes, Consulting Editor, and Frances McCullough, Editor.
New York: Dial Press, 1982.
Sylvia Plath. The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962. Transcribed from
the Original Manuscripts at Smith College. Edited by Karen V. Kukil. London:
Faber and Faber, 2000.
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Ted Hughes
inherited Plath’s manuscripts and copyrights when she died.
He published Plath’s poetry (1965, 1981) and prose (1977) and
a selection of her private journals (1982). While Aurelia Plath
may have manipulated her daughter’s words to tell the story
of a “good girl” in Letters
Home, Hughes has been criticized for selectively editing his
wife’s journals to create a dark, equally unbalanced and inaccurate
record of her life. |
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The unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962 were published in London in April 2000 with the full support of the Plath estate. They are a complete and faithful transcription of the manuscript journals owned by Smith College. They represent the first time that Plath has been allowed to speak for herself since her death in 1963. While over a hundred biographies and critical works have been written about Sylvia Plath, no scholar has been given free license by the Plath estate to interpret and liberally quote from her unpublished manuscripts.
As a scholarly community, if we have the foresight to collect important documents about women’s lives and if we properly preserve these original manuscripts, the extraordinary story that they hold will one day be told. Copyrights protecting unpublished manuscripts currently lapse seventy years after the author's death.
Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College
