The story of the last months of the life of Sylvia Plath is tracked on the flyleaves of the proof and author’s copies of her only novel, The Bell Jar. The books are inscribed in her firm, clear handwriting with addresses showing that, around the time of publication, her marriage to the poet Ted Hughes had finally collapsed and she moved with her two small children to the flat in north London where she would die in February 1963.

The books are part of a collection of Plath’s possessions, including clothes, jewellery, furniture, books with loving inscriptions from Hughes, her heavily annotated cookery book, and the Hermes typewriter on which she wrote The Bell Jar, now being sold by her only surviving child, Frieda Hughes.

Sylvia Plath, a voice that can’t be silenced | Sarah Churchwell Read more

Hughes and Plath were a dazzling couple, married within months of meeting at a student party in Cambridge in 1956 – a date commemorated in many of the inscriptions. The sale at Bonhams auctioneers in March will include her sketch of Hughes made on their Spanish honeymoon, looking as she described him like a “big unruly Huckleberry Finn”. It is estimated to fetch up to £30,000.

The sale also includes many books with tender inscriptions to Plath from Hughes: the first 1957 American edition of his first book of poems, The Hawk in the Rain, is inscribed “to Sylvia, because the book belongs to you just as surely as all my love does”. She wrote to her mother that she was as proud of the publication as if it were her own: “I have worked so closely on these poems of Ted’s and typed them so many countless times through revision after revision that I feel ecstatic about it all.” As late as May 1962, his Selected Poems is dedicated, inside a little drawing of a fox, “to darling Sylvia ... all my love, Ted”.

The scruffiest book in the sale is one of the most touching, an extremely battered copy of the Shorter Oxford dictionary. Plath and Hughes bought it as a Christmas present to themselves in 1956, and inscribed it with their names, the date of their marriage, and the birth dates of Frieda – at 6am, it notes – and Nicholas, in 1960 and 1962.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in Massachusetts, 1959. Photograph: Alamy

“The core of the collection is the words and the work,” said Luke Batterham, a senior books specialist at Bonhams, who has been working through every page of the collection before the sale. “Where another couple would have inscribed these dates in a family Bible, they used their dictionary; it was the millions of words it contained which were the most important thing for them.”



Plath’s carefully corrected proof copy of The Bell Jar – written on the pale green Hermes typewriter, which is estimated at up to £60,000 – which reached her in the autumn of 1962, is inscribed Court Green, the address of the Devon home she shared with Hughes.

Her pre-publication author’s copy, estimated at up to £80,000, is inscribed with the date Christmas 1962, and the address Fitzroy Road, the flat in north London which she moved to with her two small children when her marriage collapsed. She wrote to her mother that she expected to be happy there, but through one of the most bitter winters of the century her mood steadily darkened. The Bell Jar was published on 14 January and less than a month later she gassed herself in the kitchen of the flat.



She had already suffered from depression, and attempted suicide, before she met Hughes, but the trigger for the breakup of the marriage was his affair with another woman, and some have never forgiven him for it. However, the sale also has a wealth of evidence of the work Hughes put in for years after Plath’s death into preserving her legacy as a poet, including the publication of her collection Ariel – the copy is inscribed to his parents – and the Pulitzer prize awarded posthumously 20 years later. Frieda Hughes wrote: “Without Ariel, my mother’s literary genius might have gone unremarked forever.”

The most heavily used book, spine splitting, pages stained, heavily underlined and with marks of spilled gravy, is Plath’s “Joy of Cooking”, given to her by her mother and kept all her life. Against a recipe for breaded slices of veal rubbed with garlic, and baked in cream, Plath put a little star, and the note “Ted likes this”.

“Some of it is hard to read, knowing what happened,” Batterham said. “You would have said this was a very happy and enduring relationship, with both of them giving the highest respect and support to each other’s work.”

The collection will be sold in the books and manuscripts auction at Bonhams in London on 21 March 2018.



• This article was amended on 24 January 2018 to correct the name of the book the Joy of Cooking from the Joy of Cookery, as an earlier version had it.

