Editors Reads Verdict
Letters Home is both a rich biographical source and a fascinating literary document in its own right — the performed self Plath presents to her mother illuminates by contrast the authentic voice of the poetry and The Bell Jar, and raises genuine questions about what correspondence reveals and conceals.
What We Loved
- The letters provide an invaluable biographical record of Plath's intellectual and creative development
- The gap between the performed optimism of the letters and the darker inner life is itself a fascinating subject
- Aurelia's editorial notes, though partial, provide essential contextual information
Minor Drawbacks
- Aurelia's editorial shaping of the selection inevitably presents a partial and somewhat self-serving portrait
- The consistently upbeat tone Plath maintains for her mother makes the letters frustrating as psychological documentation
Key Takeaways
- → The self we perform for parents is rarely the self we inhabit — and the gap between them is itself revealing
- → Ambition and anxiety coexist in Plath's letters in ways that illuminate both her achievements and her vulnerabilities
- → Correspondence reveals as much through what is omitted as through what is said
| Author | Sylvia Plath |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Harper Perennial |
| Pages | 502 |
| Published | January 1, 1975 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Letters, Biography, Literary Nonfiction |
Letters Home Review
Letters Home was compiled and edited by Aurelia Schober Plath, Sylvia’s mother, and published in 1975 — more than a decade after her daughter’s death. It collects a selection of Sylvia’s letters home from 1950, when she entered Smith College at seventeen, to 1963, the year she died. It is an essential biographical document that is also, unavoidably, a shaped and partial one.
The first thing to reckon with in reading Letters Home is the editorial situation. Aurelia Plath was not a disinterested archivist but a grieving mother who had been characterised — many felt harshly — in The Bell Jar, and who selected and arranged these letters in part to counter that characterisation. The letters she includes are heavily weighted toward the cheerful, the ambitious, the reassuring. Plath’s correspondence with her mother was always, to a significant degree, a performance of competence and optimism — a conscious effort to protect Aurelia from anxiety. The darker material went elsewhere, into the diaries and the poetry.
This gap between the performed self and the actual self is itself the most revealing thing about the letters. Reading them against The Bell Jar and the poetry — particularly the poems written in the months before Plath’s death — one sees the cost of that sustained performance, the effort required to maintain a face of capability and forward movement while the inner weather was entirely different.
What the letters do provide is an irreplaceable record of Plath’s intellectual formation: her reading, her ambitions, her responses to success and rejection, her developing sense of herself as a writer. The Cambridge letters from her Fulbright years are among the most valuable — vivid accounts of encountering a culture different from her Boston upbringing, of the literary world she was entering. Plath’s gifts as a prose writer are evident throughout, and the letters are, whatever their limitations as full psychological disclosure, beautiful documents.
Our rating: 4.2/5
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "Letters Home" about?
A selection of Sylvia Plath's correspondence with her mother Aurelia from 1950 to 1963, edited by Aurelia Plath — a complex document that reveals the public face Plath maintained for her mother and the gap between that performance and the inner life she described elsewhere.
What are the key takeaways from "Letters Home"?
The self we perform for parents is rarely the self we inhabit — and the gap between them is itself revealing Ambition and anxiety coexist in Plath's letters in ways that illuminate both her achievements and her vulnerabilities Correspondence reveals as much through what is omitted as through what is said
Is "Letters Home" worth reading?
Letters Home is both a rich biographical source and a fascinating literary document in its own right — the performed self Plath presents to her mother illuminates by contrast the authentic voice of the poetry and The Bell Jar, and raises genuine questions about what correspondence reveals and conceals.
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