Sylvia Plath, Karl Jaspers

Sylvia Plath's annotated copy of Tragedy Is Not Enough, read in her first year of study at Cambridge, with marginal notes connecting the text to her own 1953 breakdown immortalized in The Bell Jar and a prophetic description of Ariel as a poet.

• Karl Jaspers (German-Swiss).
• Translated by Harald A.T. Reiche, Harry T. Moore, and Karl W. Deutsch.
• London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1953.
• 123 pages.
• First United Kingdom edition.
• Ownership inscription by Plath penned to front free endpaper: "Sylvia Plath / Cambridge / 1955."
• Pen underlining and occasional marginalia by Plath throughout.
• Several pages dog-eared (as was her practice).
• Plath's bookplate, designed by Rockwell Kent and with her typed name, laid in.
• Original blue cloth with gilt-lettered spine, in original unclipped (8/6) dust jacket.

"[W]hat the hell is tragedy? I am." — Plath, Journals

In 1955, barely two years removed from her catastrophic breakdown, 23-year-old Sylvia Plath enrolled at Newnham College, Cambridge on a Fulbright scholarship, eager to hurl herself at two thousand years of literature in a course of study she deliberately designed around her areas of least proficiency, seemingly tailor-made to aggravate any intellectual anxieties she brought with her and generate some new ones besides. "I would never have put a first-term student onto the Tragedy paper like that," her contemporary Jean Gooder later observed; "It was a crazy way to begin." In this book, Plath has left marginalia and ink trails of evidence for her progress through this formative first year at Cambridge.

Plath's copy of Jaspers's Tragedy is filled with ink underlining, stars, and occasional notes. Above all, Plath seizes on every mention of "failure." Underlining Jaspers's suggestion that "even the experience of failure may be crucial," Plath writes in the margins "cf. August 1953" — the date of her first failed suicide attempt. Plath had famously spent June of 1953 in New York as a guest editor for Mademoiselle, returning home from a month of frantic alienation to learn of her rejection from Frank O'Connor's creative writing class at Harvard Summer School. Plath descended into panicky despair, what she recorded as "Fear of failing" (Journals). But the experience of failure — as Jaspers continues here and Plath's own pen follows — may bring with it "possibilities of restructuring [one's] own personality and the further pattern of [one's] life." Plath's intense pursuit of this possibilty was evident to her tutor Dorothea Krook: "I have seemed to recognize in her whole academic effort at Cambridge a great, perhaps even a titanic, struggle for 'normalcy' against the forces of disintegration within her." By 1958, married and degreed and still striving, "all itch and eager fury," she knew what she always had: "I am made crudely, for success."

Another significant section marked by Plath is Jaspers's discussion of Shakespeare, specifically the role of his characters Prospero and Ariel — this read and underlined by Plath ten years before her Ariel. Prospero and Ariel represent, according to Jaspers, "the noble task" of the poet: "holding the mirror up to the world, of bearing witness to reality."

Jaspers's conclusion argues that, to live a great and noble life is "to endure ambiguity in the movement of truth and to make light shine through it; to stand fast in uncertainty." "To endure ambiguity": Plath crowns this with a star, underlines it, and writes it over again.