Who is Sylvia – what is she?

In May 1956, three months after meeting Ted Hughes, one before they will marry, Sylvia Plath writes to her mother Aurelia about the talented man she has fallen in love with: ‘He will start some portraits of me! A combination of both witch and ghost, perhaps.’ Because of Hughes’s editing and writing of her work, a combination of witch and ghost is precisely how we know her, and he strongly encouraged the idea that the version of Plath he offered was the ‘real one’, a core of personality born in an inevitably fatal struggle narrated through the Ariel poems. Ariel, in his view, was her only true work. ‘All her other writings, except these journals, are the waste products of its gestation,’ he wrote in the introduction to his 1985 edition of her diaries, a strange classification that consigned to the slag heap both the brilliant Bell Jar and all her other diaries (conveniently including the ones he destroyed).