The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath demonstrates more than anything that Plath was always at practice in writing.
With its publication, readers will be able to trace themes, images and her developing interests across the various genres in which she wrote. This will allow for a deeper appreciation for her drive, which is illustrated beautifully, I think, in a quote from a journal I chose as an epigraph for the book: ‘Write to recreate a mood, an incident. If this is done with color and feeling, it becomes a story.’
‘Write to recreate a mood, an incident. If this is done with color and feeling, it becomes a story.’
The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath had two unofficial starting points.
The first was in May 1998, when I visited the archive at Smith College for the first time and read uncollected, unpublished stories Plath wrote that were not included in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977, expanded 1979). At that moment, it became my aspiration to see a full edition of Plath’s prose in print. The second was in the materials I compiled as part of my work with Karen V. Kukil on the two volumes of The Letters of Sylvia Plath (2017, 2018). Accessing these pieces of prose in several genres – short fiction, non-fiction and book reviews – was instrumental in contextualising the correspondence Plath sent.
In all, Johnny Panic, edited by Ted Hughes, collected twenty-seven stories and ‘essays’ that showed its readers Plath’s ‘vitality’ in these forms of writing.
But the selective nature of that volume meant much of her work in prose remained inaccessible to general readers and scholars.
This new volume assembles 217 works – in short fiction (76 works), non-fiction (53), Smith College Press Board articles (50), book reviews (8) and fragments of stories (30). Added to these is a full critical apparatus contextualising and elucidating the material.
‘My process was to incorporate the handwritten corrections from the full typescript and weave them into the later draft. I hope the result is a seamless blended work.’
Developing the final manuscript was not without challenges.
For example, her 1955 story ‘Platinum Summer’ had to be pieced together from two typescripts: a complete copy with significant handwritten annotations held at Indiana University’s Lilly Library and a clearly later, clean four-page sampling which appears on the verso of writings by Ted Hughes held by Emory University. My process was to incorporate the handwritten corrections from the full typescript and weave them into the later draft. I hope the result is a seamless blended work.
Plath published ‘The Fifty-ninth Bear’ in Texas Quarterly in 1961. At some later point she made revisions to the story, and these were reflected in the Johnny Panic collection. I decided to revert to the story as it was originally published as I felt the piece to be better, and there was not a final typescript version which reflected Plath’s changes. In a similar fashion, her story ‘The Lucky Stone’, published in My Weekly as ‘The Perfect Place’ in October 1961: for this I reverted to Plath’s final typescript which was a couple of hundred words longer than the printed story. Reading the fuller piece honours, I believe, Plath’s intention for the Whitby-set tale as it was evident that the cuts that were made were done for space considerations rather than an editorial excision for the sake of the narrative.
The work on Plath’s Press Board articles involved reading various notebooks and cross-checking notations made in her wall and pocket calendars, as well as looking for additional references in her letters and journals, and ultimately scanning hundreds of pages of newspaper microfilms. The fifty articles that were identified likely represent a portion of those that Plath produced.
The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath does not include The Bell Jar, her school papers – though, in fact, many short stories were written as assignments in her classes – or her thesis on the double in two of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s works.
I particularly want to mention here my gratitude to Amanda Golden, co-editor of the forthcoming The Poems of Sylvia Plath. She was instrumental in helping me shift from being an editor of Plath’s letters to an editor of creative writing.
It fulfils a dream dreamt more than a quarter of a century ago to see The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath published today.
The complete edition of Sylvia Plath’s prose including much unpublished and previously uncollected material.
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) was born in Boston, Massachusetts and studied at Smith College. In 1955 she went to Cambridge University on a Fulbright scholarship, where she met and later married Ted Hughes. She published one collection of poems in her lifetime, The Colossus (1960), and a novel, The Bell Jar (1963). Her Collected Poems, which contains her poetry written from 1956 until her death, was published in 1981 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
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