Sylvia Plath died without a will. She was 30 years old at the time of her death, and a fairly well-off woman, thanks to an almost religious devotion to penny-pinching and considerable financial success from writing—both her own and her husband’s. Plath was famously married to the British poet Ted Hughes, although the two were estranged, as a result of Hughes’ infidelity, at the time of her death. According to the final chapter of Carl Rollyson’s 2013 American Isis, reports from Plath’s lawyer to her brother Warren, after her death, confirmed that Sylvia was seriously pursuing a divorce as recently as a week before her death. She and Hughes were both living in London, apart, when Plath died by suicide in her flat at 23 Fitzroy Road.
The reality is, we still don’t know all of what Plath left behind. Because of her lack of a will, everything Plath owned went to Ted Hughes. In addition to the considerable monies she left behind, Hughes was now the rightful owner of everything Sylvia had ever written.
“Everything Sylvia had ever written” is often reduced, in our cultural imagination, to her unpublished, poetic masterpiece Ariel. Plath famously left the manuscript out on her desk in a “black spring binder”—now a set piece of Plath biographies and critical studies. When we think of what Plath didn’t publish in her lifetime, we tend to think of the famous poems in typescript in that binder—“Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Lesbos,” “Sheep in Fog.”
But the reality is, we still don’t know all of what Plath left behind, which was never more clear than when I encountered archivists at the conference “Sylvia Plath: Letters, Words, Fragments” in November 2017 at Queens University in Belfast. I mentioned to an archival scholar there that I had an idea for an anthology involving all of the short fiction prompts Plath sets out for herself, but never writes, in her Journals.
“Or which we think she never wrote,” she said, in a gentle rebuttal.
“Well, I mean… we can assume…”
“No,” she said, “we can’t. We never know what else might turn up.”