The Sylvia Plath of Hughes' creation strikes the reader as remote and too measured-as if she was writing even her journals for an audience. Hughes slashed vast amounts of material from Plath's daily record, and bowdlerized much of the rest. Hughes has been cast as the villain of the piece vis-a-vis Plath's life, having been blamed (rather wrongfully) for her suicide at age thirty, and having been accused (more rightfully) of effectively censoring Plath's work, both poem and prose, following her death, whether by legal process, blue pencil, spontaneous rearrangement, or outright destruction of material.Ĭomparing the Hughes edition to the Kukil edition JOURNALS is an eye-opening education. Kukil, are a vast improvement over the perniciously edited version published in the 1980s (for too long the only one available), whose preparation was supervised by Plath's ex-husband the poet laureate of Britain, Ted Hughes. These unabridged journals, edited by Karen V. Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) is an icon of the alienated poetic soul confronted with a world of potentially numberless Auschwitzes and Nagasakis, the soul who chooses self-destruction in the face of this existential crisis.
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