They continued from where the surviving record breaks off in late 1959 and covered the last three years of her life. Two other notebooks survived for a while after her death. Sylvia Plath’s journals exist as an assortment of notebooks and bunches of loose sheets, and the selection just published here contains about a third of the whole bulk. Hughes goes on to say that “when a real self finds language, and manages to speak, it is surely a dazzling event.” However, because the “Ariel” poems reveal little about the “incidental circumstances or the crucial inner drama” that produced them, he pauses to reflect that “maybe it is this very bareness of circumstantial detail that has excited the wilder fantasies projected by others in Sylvia Plath’s name.” Publication of the journals, he feels, will presumably lay some of these fantasies to rest, but he does not elaborate on how they will do this he merely notes that they record Plath’s “day to day struggle with her warring selves” and are to be exempted from his over-all characterization of her prose writings as “waste products.” Hughes ends his three-page essay with a revelation that is so unexpected and so abrupt that one doesn’t immediately take in its significance: It was as if a dumb person suddenly spoke. Her real self had showed itself in her writing, just for a moment, three years earlier, and when I heard it-the self I had married, after all, and lived with and knew well-in that brief moment, three lines recited as she went out through a doorway, I knew that what I had always felt must happen had now begun to happen, that her real self, being the real poet, would now speak for itself, and would throw off all those lesser and artificial selves that had monopolized the words up to that point. Though I spent every day with her for six years, and was rarely separated from her for more than two or three hours at a time, I never saw her show her real self to anybody-except, perhaps, in the last three months of her life.
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