![]() ![]() ![]() "If the journals are cause for celebration, it might be, bizarrely, because evidence can be found within them to support every single theory that has ever been produced about Sylvia Plath - the never recovered child of the dead father, the woman oppressed by the small, suffering psychic landscape of her mother, the woman trapped in a domestic life unredeemed by a feminism which arrived too late on the scene, the woman nursed by her husband out of pain into burgeoning creativity, the woman betrayed. "It is a mistake to see these journals as giving us access to some new or previously hidden 'truth' about Plath," she said. Rose, in fact, was unwilling to read too much into Plath's outpourings, and argued that publication of the journals (minus the two that Plath's former husband, Ted Hughes, lost or destroyed) resolved nothing. Her conclusion - "No potential writer trying to haul themselves from bed, drudgery or distraction into writing should miss them" - made it sound more like a creative writing textbook than a new account of a life that has proved captivating and hugely controversial since Plath's suicide in 1963. ![]() Ms Rose, an authority on Plath, was given a good deal of space to expound on that significance, but didn't quite manage it. T he publication of The Journals of Sylvia Plath (Faber, £30) was, as Jacqueline Rose noted in the Observer, "heralded as an event of some literary significance". ![]()
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