You have one,” a variation of which becomes a line in “Lady Lazarus.” In one entry, Plath discusses one use of the moon as an image. She elucidates clearly the progression of the metaphor of moon as plant bulb, demonstrating an ability to analyze her own work, and also a keen eye for imagistic progression, a progression that culminates in such poems as “Fever 103°” and “Cut.”

One primary theme that runs through the early journals and is also an identifiable current in Plath’s poetry and prose is the theme of rebirth. After a bout of depression during the fall of her junior year, she characterizes her rehabilitation as rolling “the stone of inertia away from the tomb.” She sees herself as “The girl who dies. And was resurrected.” Often sounding like Norman Vincent Peale, she credits her rebirth to mental magic, a belief that attitude can change everything. She attributes achievements—poems in Harper’s Magazine, a summer guest editorship at Mademoiselle—to the conscious choice she has made, that of transforming wish to reality through hard work.

The three entries drawn from the summer of 1953, however, prior to her suicide attempt, belie Plath’s ability to choose between dark or light, death or life. The first entry parallels the opening of her novel, The Bell Jar (1963), as she speaks of her physical sickness at the imminent electrocution of the Rosenbergs. She longs to crawl back to the womb, to avoid choice, to abdicate responsibility. She labels one entry “Letter to an Over-grown, Over-protected, Scared, Spoiled Baby,” while trying to exhort herself to think, to take action. The final entry ends with a pathetic plea: “please, think—snap out of this. Believe in some beneficent force beyond your own limited self. God, god, god: where are you? I want you, need you: the belief in you and love and mankind. You must not seek escape like this. You must think.” Perhaps this plea can be seen as a longing for the father/authority she does not have, a theme that appears more frequently in her journals as she matures.

At the end of this section, the editors have appended a note stating that journals no longer exist (if they ever did) for the two years following Plath’s suicide attempt, so that while the dates given are 1950 to 1955, the final entry is dated July 14, 1953. This two-year gap is the first that readers will bemoan, since ideas for The Bell Jar and many poems originated from this time.

The second section of The Journals of Sylvia Plath covers the two years Plath spent as a Fulbright Scholar at Cambridge University and her year as a teacher at Smith College, a time of transition and change. By the end of this period, 1955 to 1958, she had committed herself to a life of writing rather than to academia, as well as to marriage. Plath’s infatuation with Ted Hughes was immediate; they married four months after meeting. In her journal, she characterizes him as a panther, a Neptune, a god, taking clear delight in marriage and in performing such duties as typing his poems. While she feels fortunate to have found domestic happiness with her poet husband, she is concerned about losing her writing self in the world of domesticity, and while she wishes to have a child, she wants first to produce a book. In one entry, she worries, prophetically, that she is too bound to Hughes, that if anything happened to him “I would either go mad, or kill myself.” Her capacity for rage is revealed in an entry made on May 19, 1958, which describes her husband walking with a young Smith student when he was supposed to be meeting her. Months later, she was able to link this rage to her feelings of abandonment by her dead father.

Indeed, the search for a father assumes major proportions in this section. Pleas abound for “some man, who is a father.” In a particularly enlightening entry written on Mother’s Day, 1958, Plath discusses the possibility of using “Full Fathom Five,” the title of one of her poems, as a book title because of the importance of the sea as a central metaphor in her work, the father as “buried male muse and god—creator risen to be my mate in Ted, to the sea-father Neptune.” She continues, “so the river flows to the paternal source of godhead.”

Aspects of the resurrection theme appear also, sometimes linked to the search for father, and, more often, in reference to herself. She recollects her electroshock therapy as “waking to a new world, with no name, being born again, and not of woman.” In fact, she speaks directly about her fascination with the Lazarus story, paralleling it with her own rising again after her suicide attempt. Her appreciation of “the mere sensation value of being suicidal” resonates in the dramatic tone of “Lady Lazarus.”

Both direct and indirect references to Plath’s work appear often in this section. Notes and observations can be traced to subsequent poems, including “Spider,” “Hardcastle Crags,” and “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor,” to name only a few. The poems, “Whiteness I Remember” and “Ariel” seem to derive in part from the following entry: “Then there was the time . . . when the horse galloped into the street-crossing and the stirrups came off leaving me hanging around his neck, jarred breathless, thinking in an ecstasy: is this the way the end will be?” Plath describes the completion of several poems, as well as her plans for a novel which include ideas that were incorporated eventually into The Bell Jar. Her system of imagery and correspondence begins to emerge as she sprinkles her journal entries with references to colors (red and black, colors she often wore), to fire and electricity (tied to passion and to destruction), to the moon, frogs, sea, rock—a fascinating mine for Plath scholars. Here, too, she discusses several writers she wishes to emulate in her prose. She makes particular reference to Henry James and D. H. Lawrence and draws artistic and personal parallels between herself and Virginia Woolf. With her other hand, she makes plans to write commercial stories for the “slicks” under a pseudonym: Sylvan Hughes.

Throughout this period, Plath’s two-headed demon of self-doubt and ambitious perfectionism never leaves her: “Again, I feel the gulf between my desire and ambition and my naked abilities.” The phrase “a life is passing” forms a motif, and she puts great pressure on herself to write, thereby re-creating her life. Such re-creation makes her feel godlike, gives her the aura of immortality and control. In this period of transition, she wants to succeed in the adult literary world, not in the adolescent markets where she has experienced what she now characterizes as facile success. At the same time, she admits that she depends too much on having poems published in The New Yorker. She is often frankly envious of and acidly humorous about more successful writers. Nevertheless, Plath continues to fight her demon, the one who “wants me to think I’m so good I must be perfect. Or nothing.”

The final section of the journals contains entries from the summer of 1958 through the fall of 1959, when Plath lived in Boston. The last real entry is dated November 15, 1959, from Yaddo, prior to Plath and Hughes’s return to England to await the birth of their first child. The last years of her life are represented by a piece titled “The Inmate,” written between February 27 and March 6, 1961, when Plath was in the hospital having her appendix removed, and by a series of sketches of her Devon neighbors dated February through July, 1962.

During her time in Boston, Plath was faced with having only to write, an immense task that initially overwhelmed her, but again, she set goals: “I must slowly set my lands in order: make my dream of self with poems, breast-sucking babies, a Wife-of-Bath calm, humor and resilience.” Two poems were accepted by The New Yorker, yet she remained dissatisfied with her work, feeling that she was still searching for her “true deep voice.” In her journal, she even wonders if her poetry is simply an escape from prose, from the novel and stories she longs to write.

The entries from December 12, 1958, through June 20, 1959, are filled with penetrating questions, self-analyses, and remarkable insights, during a period in which Plath underwent therapy with the psychiatrist who treated her after her suicide attempt in 1953. These entries weave a tapestry in which readers can discern the pattern of recurring conflicts and problems: the issues of father-search, mother-guilt, hostility, and manipulation, as well as Plath’s concern with rebirth, a desire to remake herself as a strong woman and writer. Apparent is her urge to become independent, both from Hughes—to show him none of her poems—and from her mother—to avoid confiding in her.

Plath’s search for identity paralleled her search for voice, and in the fall of 1959 at Yaddo, as if released, she began to write poems which hinted at the power of her later work, including “The Manor Garden,” “The Colossus,” “Medallion,” “Poem for a Birthday,” “The Burnt-out Spa,” and “Mushrooms.” As she comments: “I wonder about the poems I am doing. They seem moving, interesting, but I wonder how deep they are. The absence of a tightly reasoned and rhythmed logic bothers me. Yet frees me. . . .”

Throughout this section, Plath discusses many poems, stories, and ideas for a novel, an invaluable source for research. Unfortunately, the final two notebooks from late 1959 until her death in February, 1963, are not available—the last one destroyed by Hughes, the other missing. It is regrettable that scholars do not have these journals, since Plath wrote the body of her work during this turbulent, but most creative, period. It must be noted also that The Journals of Sylvia Plath are edited selections, encompassing only one-third of Plath’s notebook entries. The editors state that they have cut lists of characters, prospective poems and stories, descriptions, and commentary, as well as particularly devastating remarks. The remaining unedited journals are available, however, at The Neilson Library at Smith College. It is there that readers can find a more complete self-portrait of Sylvia Plath, the complex woman and artist that this book so tantalizingly sketches.