Sylvia Plath | Typed letter signed, to Ted Hughes, on her studies and Hughes's fables, 18 October 1956

Sylvia Plath

Typed letter signed, to Ted Hughes ("dearest darling ted...")

describing the pleasure of her recent supervision with Dr Krook ("...god's foreknowledge and man's free will, and the low debased view of physical love between man and women even in 'blameless wedlock' for an hour and a half this morning, rain falling outside...") contrasting with the distance she feels from her peers, news that one of her stories will be printed in Granta, and her delight that Hughes has submitted a group of his fables "to the children's program girl", scattered autograph corrections and a four-line autograph postscript, 4 pages, 8vo (176 x 139mm), headed stationery of Newnham College, Cambridge, "thursday afternoon 2:30 october 17" [in fact 18 October 1956] 

This letter shows Plath more immersed in Cambridge life, especially thanks to Dorothea Krook (1920-1989) her supervisor and her favourite teacher at Cambridge. Krook later recalled Plath as "one of the most deeply, movingly responsive pupils I had ever had. I felt the things I said, we said, her authors said, mattered to her in an intimate way, answering to intense personal needs, reaching to depths of her spirit." (quoted in Clark, Red Comet, p.442). In this letter Plath calls her "my one woman friend, here", in contrast with her peers who are condemned as artificial extroverts or "vehement catholics; narrow, secure, and incredibly pious". 

She passes on the news that the university magazine Granta will publish her story 'The Day Mr Prescott Died', which was based on the death of a close friend's father in 1954, but the story "seems slight to me now". She is much more excited about Hughes's submission of a group of children's fables, which she is typing up for submission to the Atlantic Press, although she bridles against the publisher's strictures against depicting gods in the stories ("...there is certainly a precedent for your familiar way of presenting god; a kind of childlike innocence of fear and trembling, making it all very concrete poetic story without I think any 'danger' of overthrowing the young reader's faith in an omniscient invulnerable abstract god...").

LITERATURE:

The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume One, pp.1307-9