In Sylvia Plath’s journals and letters, the writer documents the creation, submission, acceptance and rejection of scores of prose works. While most of these pieces reside in archives now, only the most ardent of researchers have an understanding of how her efforts in this style fit into her entire body of work. The first edition of the prose collection Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977) printed what was deemed at the time to be the best of Plath’s prose work in three genres: short fiction, ‘essays’ and journals. While it contained many previously printed works, it did not include everything Plath saw to print. Stories like ‘And Summer Will Not Come Again’, ‘Den of Lions’ and ‘The Perfect Setup’, which earned Plath a national audience, acclaim, prizes and money in her first years at Smith College, were left out. It excludes, as well, the last story Plath published in her lifetime, ‘The Perfect Place’ (titled ‘The Lucky Stone’ in typescript by Plath, and presented in Part I). Following the publication of Plath’s adult journals* and the two volumes of her letters,† in which she mentions many of the works in this volume, the need for a fuller edition of her prose has never been greater.

Throughout her writing life, Plath endeavoured to be proficient and successful at authoring prose works. The earliest stories show an active imagination that reflects the reality of her environment in suburbs of the metropolitan region of Boston during the Second World War and just after. The characters she created and the situations she imagined have concerns with material wealth, poverty, depression, loneliness and magic, to name a few themes. As Plath honed her skill, the stories steadily grew longer and fuller. Through her study of periodicals such as Seventeen, Mademoiselle, the New Yorker and Ladies’ Home Journal, she gained an awareness of what her target magazines would print. As a student of Smith College, she succeeded in placing stories in Seventeen and Mademoiselle. Later when at Newnham College and as an adult, full-time writer, her works appeared in university publications such as Granta and Gemini and literary periodicals like the London Magazine and Sewanee Review.

Plath periodically attempted to shelve poetry in favour of prose. In January 1956, she wrote in a letter to her ex-boyfriend Gordon Lameyer, ‘Am much more desirous of writing prose, good short stories, now, than poetry, which isn’t wide enough for all the people and places I am beginning to have at my fingertips’ (Letters, Volume 1: 1088). The following summer, she was honest concerning the tug-of-war between writing prose versus poetry: ‘Prose is not so easy to come into maturity as the poetry which, by its smallness & my practise with form, can look complete. The main problem is breaking open rich, real subjects to myself & forgetting there is any audience …’ ( Journals: 293). A few months later, on 14 January 1958, the pendulum had swung back: ‘Poems are out: too depressing. If they’re bad, they’re bad. Prose is never quite hopeless’ (312).

Following her Fulbright fellowship and a year of teaching at her alma mater, Plath left academia to try her hand as a full-time writer. In her year in Boston (1958–9), Plath completed several dozen poems and at least seven short stories, including a trilogy – ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’, ‘The Fifteen-Dollar Eagle’ and ‘The Daughters of Blossom Street’ – set in her birth city, as well as some works no longer extant or existing in fragments only.

But Plath was never content with short fiction. Eager for writing projects and to have her work out for consideration, Plath consistently experimented with various forms of non-fiction: writing reports as a summer camper and covering events at her junior high school, through to relating the harrowing experience of living through the infamous Big Freeze of 1963 in the last weeks of her life. She found most success with writing about her travel and work experiences, primarily for the Christian Science Monitor, during her years of study at Smith and Newnham, and then later, in 1959.

Among the many values of these writings is the way they relate to the lives Plath leads and which she records in her other works: her letters, her journals and even her poetry. She admitted as much to her mother in a letter, ‘When I say I must write, I don’t mean I must publish. There is a great difference. The important thing is the aesthetic form given to my chaotic experience’ (Letters, Volume 1: 1090). She mined her life and work, exchanging themes and images across all forms of her writing. The result is that the works in this volume exhibit a richness of intertextuality when read in concert with her autobiographical writing and poems. To borrow from poet and Plath scholar David Trinidad, reading Plath’s works together creates a ‘movie of her life’. She shows, ultimately, a determination to write in any genre, to never stop the act of writing, no matter what. This is Sylvia Plath’s achievement.

This edition of Sylvia Plath’s prose collects all the known works she published in her lifetime as well as unpublished pieces held in archives. It demonstrates Plath to be a prodigious writer in the genres of fiction and non-fiction; though it does not include school papers, her thesis ‘The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky’s Novels’ or The Bell Jar. Her short stories and two works for children in Part I comprise the largest section of the book. The non-fiction sections are sub-divided into the following categories: non-fiction (Part II), Smith College Press Board (Part III) and book reviews (Part IV). While there are a few exceptions, Plath’s non-fiction journalism in Part II primarily contains texts about her lived experiences: be it a school assembly, the joys and throes of babysitting, walking to Top Withens near Haworth in Yorkshire, or recalling the land and seascape of her childhood. The Smith College Press Board articles are separate from Plath’s other non-fiction writing because in style, content and purpose, they represent a distinctive unit from those works appearing, sometimes concurrently, in Part II. Plath worked for the Press Board in her second and third years as an undergraduate. The majority of the pieces – only two published pieces are attributed to her – were identified by reading Plath’s letters, calendars and notebooks and then searching microfilm for the Daily Hampshire Gazette, the Springfield Daily News and the Springfield Union. On occasion, two articles ran in two different newspapers and so there are some instances where both appear as the content varies, giving, potentially, a fuller flavour of Plath’s reporting. These pieces were possibly heavily revised by the newspaper editors for space considerations. The Smith College Archives holds some original typescripts with Plath credited as ‘Correspondent’. In these instances, the typescript is the source for the text and full bibliographic citations for the printed articles appear in the footnotes. Plath’s book reviews show her to be a close and careful reader. The flurry of reviews from 1961 to 1963 show Plath to be on the cusp of a new aspect of her career, particularly in the case of her BBC review, which aired on 10 January 1963.

Two appendices follow the book reviews in Part IV. Appendix I prints fragments of works – some quite well known, others more obscure – that are incomplete portions of both finished and abandoned works and story ideas Plath jotted down. Appendix II is an introduction to ‘Marcia Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom’ – a revision of the story ‘Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom’ – which Plath adapted in late 1954 and early 1955 when she was considering submitting the story to the Christopher Awards, an annual contest for creative works that ‘affirm the highest values of the human spirit’.

Though there are some exceptions, the following are the general principles informing editorial decisions. If the work was published during Plath’s lifetime, then the publication copy is used, correcting obvious typographical errors. If a piece is in manuscript or typescript, then the copy deemed the most final is the copy text. For compositions printed after Plath’s death, I revert to the final typescript. I exercised some light editing of texts to modernise and to make consistent the spelling and forms of words. For example, ‘extra-curricular’ becomes ‘extracurricular’; ‘kleenex’ is ‘Kleenex’. Punctuation, spelling and forms of words vary depending on the location of writing. Works written in the USA appear with US style. Those written in England and Spain have UK formatting. The aim here is to showcase Plath’s transatlanticism.

Text that falls within angle brackets are editorial interventions; square brackets indicate Plath’s own...