Letters Home

Commentators have called the 1975 publication of Letters Home, edited by Aurelia Plath, a ‘corrective’ or an ‘antidote’ to The Bell Jar. As we have seen, the novel was not originally intended for publication in the USA. Once it became clear that it was necessary legally, and attractive financially so to do, Aurelia was persuaded not to veto its appearance. Nevertheless, she experienced the book as a bitter and ungrateful attack by her daughter on those she knew and loved. Its immediate popularity on its April 1971 appearance in the USA (it spent five months in the bestseller charts) coupled with the by then well-known ‘back story’ emerging from Ariel and other posthumous poems, meant that – as Aurelia had feared – the novel was widely read (even, as Tracy Brain's The Other Sylvia Plath points out, promoted) as an autobiographical study.

In her 1983 essay, ironically written in the form of a letter and published in Paul Alexander's 1985 Ariel Ascending, Aurelia describes her dismay at the ‘violation’ she saw in The Bell Jar. There, as we saw in Chapter 5, she argues that her daughter's art ‘transformed personalities into cruel and false caricatures’. The effect is all the more shocking, it seems, when compared with the ‘close, affectionate … good, supportive’ and ‘wholesome’ life that the mother had, in her own version of ‘actuality’, been able to provide. Letters Home was conceived as an attempt to put this record straight.