I've read this before, many years ago, but it was a pleasure to return to. It's a phenomenal journey through Plath's teenage and college years up until the time she was about to leave the U.S. for good, married to Ted Hughes and pregnant with their first child, and just on the verge of making her poetic breakthrough. We see everything from teenage naivete to early-20s obsession with self and lovers and first suicide attempt, especially Richard Sassoon (the entries involving him are perhaps the only ones I find almost unbearable to read), and finally her agonizing struggles over giving up her long-wanted academic career to pursue writing, a decision that both terrified her and put her in direct conflict with her mother.
Then it's the long section where she faces, for the first time, trying to be a writer as her primary vocation, and the world of struggles that go along with that. As a writer myself, this is the section I found mesmerizing. She's balancing her own needs and fears along with her role of a 1950s American woman and wife, as well as the expectations of her mother, and her own fears of failure as a writer. It's hard to believe that she didn't know about the success ahead of her, but of course, how could she?
While there are some post-1959 writings in the appendices, this volume does make the reader--this reader, anyway--really regret what's lost: the journals written after Plath and Hughes returned to Britain in late 1959. I saw someone on Goodreads commenting that this journal collection just shows how Plath was subjugated by Hughes and gave up her artistic autonomy to him as she wrote the most important works of her career. Um, no. Those poems were written in 1962-63. The poems she wrote during most of this journal are not largely considered to be her best work. In the latter half of 1959, the couple had a long stay at the writer's retreat Yaddo, and while there Plath did have a beginning of a breakthrough, composing things like Mushrooms and Poem for a Birthday that set the stage for her later work.
Yes, in the journals she talks a great deal about the importance of Ted's work, and he seems to have been miles ahead of her at this stage, at least in terms of self-confidence and willingness to take risks. Yet she also notes the support he provided her during her myriad down times. So I don't think that Goodreads reviewer really grasped the timing and complexity of the situation.
And that makes me really wistful for a final volume of journals. Ted Hughes has said that he burned the last notebooks, and the ones previous to that "disappeared." Of course, that's led to all kinds of rumors. I can't help but hope that there's an unopened archive somewhere that still has them. Not because of the salacious details of the marital downfall between them, but to see Plath's journey as she increasingly came into her own as a writer and wrote the poems that she finally, correctly, said would make her name.
Alas, that is life in the literary artifact zone. Complete works are simply not always available, but this is a valuable piece to look at one writer's partial journey.