Since her death in 1963 at the age of thirty, the biography industry – from its demonising to its hagiographical extremes – has fed on Plath. When she wrote, in a late poem ‘Words’, of words’ echoes travelling on, ‘dry and riderless’ with ‘indefatigable hooftaps’, she might have been prophesying the afterlife of her own work. Yet the ‘peanut-crunching crowd’ she evoked in ‘Lady Lazarus’ has demonstrated a more voracious appetite for speculation and gossip. Plath is a magnet for peanut-crunchers, mostly uninterested in the feast of her late poetry. Discussion of Plath has been intemperate and extreme, epitomised by the words of her sister-in-law Olwyn Hughes, who described her as ‘pretty straight poison’ yet became her literary executor.

This collection contains three prefaces. Frieda Hughes, Plath’s daughter with English poet Ted Hughes, writes about her mother’s prolific letter-writing, but devotes half her note to a defence of the ways her father ‘honoured’ the work Plath left when she died, and the significance of the writers to one another, which returns to the very tensions such a collection seeks to remediate by letting Plath speak for herself.

Editors Peter K. Steinberg (an archivist who maintains ‘the oldest, continuously updated website for Plath’) and Karen V. Kukil (curator of the Plath collection at Smith College library, and of several key exhibitions of Plath’s archival material) describe this desire to allow Plath ‘to narrate her own autobiography’. Their aim – ‘to present a complete and historically accurate text of all the known, existing letters to a full range of her correspondents’ – is ambitious in its scope and in the ethical impulse it implies. The work evident throughout this collection, the first of a pair, in the meticulousness of its notes and the vast quantity of letters assembled, is extraordinary. Completion may be an impossible goal, but the collection is impressive in its scale. For those interested in the evolution of Plath’s writing, and of the development of particular works and ideas, it is a treasury.

Steinberg and Kukil argue, though, that Plath’s epistolary style is ‘as vivid, powerful, and complex as her poetry, prose and journal writing’. This large claim sidesteps the very different purposes of these forms, and over-eggs the pudding. This metaphor isn’t accidental. One aspect of the corporeal that the Plath letters gloriously highlight is her appetite. In the delightful earliest letters of a seven-year-old Plath to her father, Otto, who died just a couple of years later, ice-cream is a key theme. From the start of an extensive correspondence with her mother, Aurelia, that lasted until her final days, an eleven-year-old Plath is a diligent cataloguer of ‘coco’, cookies, a ‘kheese and balonae sandwich’, raspberry jello, chopped beef, salad, prunes, glasses of milk, ‘doughnuts’. Plath was to become the original ‘procrastibaker’, a term that obscures the role cooking has for some writers as part of the creative process. A superficial analysis might dismiss Plath’s interest in food as purely a subscription to the mores of femininity. It was an aspect of her creativity, and is a metonym for her sensuality, appetite, and resourcefulness.

Much later, writing as a newlywed to Hughes during a short absence, her descriptions of food poignantly (and with the self-aware wit that shoots through these letters) convey her longing. Cream crackers are ‘soggy; the nescafe is a hard cake; the strawberry jam is rancid. I drank the last of the Chilean burgundy and I love you’. She eats ‘a lousy little breakfast of queer-tasting honey on white (ugh) toast’, but declines ‘a pale bilious green dessert (dyed custard) poured over a lady-finger biscuit’. A good childhood day is ‘honeydew melon and hot blueberry muffins’, and Plath’s and Hughes’ Spanish honeymoon is a feast of sardines, tomatoes, butter, and ‘bread made in dark cave-like ovens’.

The other dominant strand in Plath’s correspondence charts the development and publication of her work. Readers know the results of Plath’s visionary talent, but the letters reinforce her ambition, grit, and tenacity. This is evident early, but from her first letter from Smith College, in 1950, to her benefactor, Olive Higgins Prouty, when she describes her ‘interest in writing’ as ‘a very vital part of me’, there is an additional accent on an extraordinary tenacity.

She powers on despite the impact of trauma and the oscillations in her emotional and mental health these letters more often conceal than reveal. In those letters that cut through her empathic instinct to put the reassurance of her correspondents first, her straight gaze at mental illness and its treatment recalls that of her contemporary, Janet Frame, who was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and received over two hundred ECT treatments, administered without anaesthetic. In Frame’s autobiography she describes ECT as ‘the equivalent, in degree of fear, to an execution’.

Eddie Cohen first wrote to Plath as a college English student and ‘fan’ after reading a story she published in Seventeen. With Cohen, Plath felt less need to dissemble and reassure. At first she valued the letters less, commenting to her mother that she was so keen for a letter ‘even Eddie C. would do’. But Cohen was an interlocutor with whom Plath was open – she also calls their correspondence ‘magnetic’. During her hospitalisation and ECT treatment she describes the sensation of ‘shuddering in horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room’.

In contrast, the most sustained and in some ways restrained correspondence is with her mother. In a letter from Cambridge, where she was studying, to her brother, Warren, Plath notes that she has ‘hacked through a hard vacation, shared really only the best parts with mother, not the racking ones’.

Virginia Woolf described her journal writing as ‘loosening the ligaments’. This feast of letters is most fascinating as a part of Plath’s practice as a writer – maybe even as a writer of the dramatic monologues for which she is famous, since crafting a voice and playing a role often seem central.

Does it simply fuel an acquisitive, compulsive approach to Plath, or does it enhance the feast, like Emily Dickinson’s ‘envelope poems’, the latest Bob Dylan bootleg, or the recently published ‘lost’ Neruda poems, found scribbled on menus and scraps of paper? The opportunity to trawl through Plath’s larder, garden, and heart builds, in me, an appetite for the work that sprang from these places, and from this epistolary limbering-up.