Honestly, I don't know how to review this book. Sylvia Plath has inspired a lot of curiosity about her life since she committed suicide and left a mass of interesting poetry and bad prose in her wake. I will admit that she has intrigued, and still intrigues me. I just have to wonder about a few things: why would her mother publish this book of correspondence during her lifetime? Perhaps she was seeking to establish a view of her daughter as a real, breathing, doubting human being, not just as some kind of feminist icon (and if you believe Plath was a feminist in the modern, PC version of the word, just read her journals). I wouldn't doubt that; the bond between Aurelia Plath and her daughter was undoubtedly strong, though imperfect (as are all parental relationships). But these letters. . .perhaps they will be of interest to scholars in the future, excavating the mines of a minor 20th-century poet seeking motivations for some of her more famous poems. . .I don't know. I don't mean to belittle either Sylvia or her mother, but I don't know why this uninteresting book was published.

Letters Home offers a great look at the unseen side of Plath--the side her mother was allowed into. Here, one can see the woman behind her works, and is allowed to travel with her during her scholastic years until her death. A very moving and personal view from in own words.

One of the theories of Plath's work presented in Knoll's book "Chapters in a Mythology" is that Plath's poems reflect the struggle between Plath's warring "true" and "false" selves. In the same way, Knoll seems to be trying to serve to masters when writing her book. She writes of working closely and very well with the Hughes estate, something which is almost unheard of, considering most critics and biographer's of Plath only come head-to-head against the estate's manipulation and tight grasp on the rights to Plath's works. One arguement is that too much of her work is being transformed into a feminist liberation cause that Plath herself never took up.

For Knoll, the temptation to put in some feminist criticism was too great, as it sneaks in here and there, as she deconstructs such poems as "Rabbit Catcher" and "Moon and the Yew Tree" in the way in which the Hughes estate sees fit, sneaking in feminist thinking between the lines. What comes through ends up being a muddied critique with conflicting ideas trying to support themselves with the same evidence at hand. Knoll, like Plath, was trying to server to masters in the authorship of this book. However, unlike her subject, Knoll was unable to sucessfully convey the meaning sufficantly for either side.

All these one-star reviews are dead on. Oddly, though, from a mathematical perspective, if you add them all up, they only amount to about a half a star. That's how awful even the mere conception of this book is. If you have any doubts, let me offer one thought that I don't see presented so far: Do you really think it's just happenstance that this book only exists now that the three principals are dead? Tennant would have had her tail sued off had she tried something like this in Hughes' lifetime.

This book is in spectacularly bad taste. The "fictionalizations" is spiteful, jealous, transparently vindictive, and very badly written. So much so it is almost laughable in places.

The author does not appear to understand that slandering someone is rhetorically very difficult-- usually the reader will see through the attempt, and end up sympathizing with the one being slandered.

She particularly loses credibility in her portrayal of Clarissa Roche-- presented in this book as an almost angelic presence in Plath's life, with no gray areas. By golly, look at that! The book is dedicated to Roche! Uhmmm.. just how stupid does she think her readers are?

My benefit of the doubt points for both Plath and Hughes have skyrocketted.

The reviews below giving Emma Tennant's lyrical and lovely novel of the lives of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes low scores are clearly from Slyviaphiles with axes to grind. Yes, Emma Tennant dated Ted Hughes in the 1970s, but that doesn't make a whit of difference in her beautiful rendering of one of the last century's most celebrated love triangles. I savored every word and can't wait for the movie to come out.