This is a disturbing and arresting tale that provokes all sorts of questions on the morality of journalism, a very thought provoking book with a very contemporary argument at its centre.

This volume contains all of Sylvia Plath's mature poetry written from 1956 up to her death in 1963. It was awarded the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The text is preceded by an introduction by Ted Hughes and followed by notes and comments on individual poems. An appendix contains 50 earlier poems.

The author argues that without a concept of fantasy we can understand neither Plath's work nor what she has come to represent. She proposes that no writer demonstrates more forcefully than Plath the importance of inner psychic life for the wider sexual and political world.

With just two exceptions, these 88 poems, in the form of an intimate and candid narrative, are addressed to Sylvia Plath, the American poet to whom Ted Hughes was married. They were written over a period of more than 25 years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963.

Sylvia Plath's correspondence, addressed chiefly to her mother, from her time at Smith College in the early 1950s up to her suicide in London in February 1963. In addition to her capacity for domestic and writerly happiness, these letters also hint at her potential for deep despair.