Sylvia Plath’s letters, Vol. 2, reviewed in New York Times, omits issue raised in New York Times review of Vol. 1: Sylvia Plath’s split personality

Volume 1 of Sylvia Plath’s letters was reviewed in The New York Times under the title, “Sylvia Plath’s Letters Reveal a Writer Split in Two.” This is how that review ended:

“The achievement of this avalanche of letters — 1,300 pages and counting — is that it disabuses everyone of the notion that Plath wasn’t aware of her contradictions…She referenced her two selves every time she went from blonde to brunette (‘ I’m rather sure that my brown-haired personality will win out this year,’ she wrote to a boyfriend. ‘Gone is the frivolous giddy gilded creature who careened around corners at the wheel of a yellow convertible.’) Her honors thesis was, in part, on Dostoevsky’s “The Double,” after all, in which a self splits, and one kills the other” (1).

Volume 2 of Sylvia Plath’s letters has just been reviewed. Toward the end of this review, it quotes Plath as thanking her psychiatrist for helpful advice, “The part about keeping my personal one-ness is a real help.” However, this is quoted in the context of her “struggling to imagine life without Ted Hughes,” as the review is titled (2). There is nothing in this review that refers back to the issue raised in the first review—Plath’s being split into two personalities—as the possible reason she was having a problem in “keeping my personal one-ness.”

Perhaps her psychiatrist, like the psychiatrist in The Bell Jar, failed to make the diagnosis of multiple personality. (Search my past posts on Plath and her novel.)

1. Parul Sehgal. “Sylvia Plath’s Letters Reveal a Writer Split in Two.” New York Times, Oct. 10, 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/books/review-sylvia-plath-letters-volume-one.html

2. Katie Roiphe. “Sylvia Plath’s Last Letters Show Her Struggling to Imagine Life Without Ted Hughes.” New York Times, Nov. 8, 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/books/review/peter-steinberg-karen-kukil-letters-of-sylvia-plath-volume-2.html