Via the first volume of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Karen Kukil traces the key themes and concerns that preoccupy the writer, providing an intellectual, cultural and personal biography. Thereby, Kukil establishes the key contexts out of which Plath’s poetry and fiction emerge. After the well-documented deletions in Letters Home, and the dissatisfaction many readers felt at a selection that depicted Plath as ceaselessly happy, Kukil views the full and unabridged letters as akin to a full-length colour film after a black and white short.

Amanda Golden addresses Plath’s pedagogical strategies in order to shed new light on the ways that her identities as a student, teacher, and poet overlap. Focusing on her teaching of modernism, including the work of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Henry James, Golden shows how Plath’s later writing refashions the language she used as a teacher. Golden draws heavily on the teaching notes Plath made whilst working in the English Department at Smith College, combing through Plath’s lists, lectures, and the passages from critical texts that she highlighted.

Peter K Steinberg shows us how Plath used scrapbooks as an early means of honing her story telling techniques and narrative skills, combining the linguistic and visual aptitudes that were present throughout her life and developing the art of self-performance and selection that are vital to any artist. Moreover, these relatively overlooked documents are a valuable source of key biographical data that amplify our understanding of the context out of which the work emerged.