‘The Letters of Sylvia Plath’ review: Hefty Volume 1 offers portrait of the poet as a young woman

Sylvia Plath may have died at the age of 30, but in her short life she produced an enormous body of writing. She wrote a radio play, a children’s book, dozens of short stories, and numerous incidental pieces of journalism and memoir. She started two novels and published a third, “The Bell Jar,” now regarded as a coming-of-age classic. She wrote more than 200 poems. Gathered into her “Collected Poems,” which won a 1982 Pulitzer Prize, they showcased her as a master of the “confessional” style.

She also kept an extensive journal and carried on voluminous correspondence with family members, friends and business contacts. Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil have gathered Plath’s correspondence into “The Letters of Sylvia Plath,” a collection so mammoth it will be published in two volumes. Volume 1, alone, covering 1940 to 1956, runs more than 1,300 pages.

The letters begin in 1940, when Plath was 8, with notes to her parents. They go on to document her youth in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where she grew up in a “cozy little ‘matchbox.’ ” Tellingly, Plath hardly ever mentions the death in 1940 of her father, a highly regarded biologist and Boston University professor who misdiagnosed himself with cancer, refused treatment, and died from what turned out to be a treatable form of diabetes.

A vast number of the letters document her education at Smith College. The litany of successes — studying with W.H. Auden, acceptances from The Nation and The Christian Science Monitor, a guest editorship at Mademoiselle — were eclipsed by what happened in the summer of 1953, when she was not accepted into Frank O’Connor’s fiction class at Harvard University.

“I began to frequent the offices and couches of the local psychiatrists,” Plath wrote to her friend Edward Cohen. “I underwent a rather brief and traumatic experience of badly-given shock treatments on an outpatient basis. Pretty soon, the only doubt in my mind was the precise time and method of committing suicide.”

She stole a bottle of 50 sleeping pills from her mother’s safe, hid in the crawl space under the front porch of the family home and swallowed many of them. “I . . . blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion [but] I had stupidly taken too many pills, vomited them, and came to consciousness in the dark hell. . . . My brother finally heard my weak yells.”

A stint at McLean Hospital was followed by her return to Smith to complete her degree. A Fulbright scholarship allowed her to study at Cambridge University. There, she met the man who would alter the direction of her life.

In March 1956, Plath mentioned her new love interest to her mother for the first time: “Met, by the way, a brilliant ex-Cambridge poet at the wild St. Botolph’s Review party last week; will probably never see him again . . . but wrote my best poem about him afterwards: the only man I’ve met yet here who’d be strong enough to be equal with.” In another letter she named him: “His name is Ted Hughes: he is tall, hulking, with rough brown hair, a large-cut face, hands like derricks, a voice more thundering and rich than Dylan Thomas.”

Four months after meeting, Plath and Hughes were married in a secret ceremony in London — Plath feared losing her Fulbright — attended only by Plath’s mother. Volume 1 ends with a decision by Plath to reveal her marriage so that Hughes could join her at Cambridge. Readers will have to wait until October for Volume 2, and the letters that chronicle their marriage — the dissolution of which contributed to Plath’s suicide in 1963.