Dear Mother, . . .
I hope I shan’t be so proud as to forget myself. Yet there is a secret pleasure one has to hear one’s self praised. You must know, then, that my Lady Davers, who, I need not tell you, is my master’s sister, has been a month at our house, and has taken great notice of me, and given me good advice to keep myself to myself. She told me I was a very pretty wench, and that every body gave me a very good character, and loved me; and bid me take care to keep the fellows at a distance; and said, that I might do, and be more valued for it, even by themselves. . . .
Your honest as well as dutiful DAUGHTER
The words are Pamela’s in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740). But they might as well be Sylvia Plaths’s in this first volume of what amounts to a magnificent epistolary novel. She wrote more to her mother than to anyone else, although probably close to a thousand letters to other recipients may no longer exist. Aurelia Plath preserved every scrap of her daughter’s correspondence, affirming not only her undying love for her daughter but also the conviction that Sylvia Plath would matter well beyond the confines of their two lives.
Sylvia Plath prevails not because she died young and full of promise, not because she is a feminist martyr,
