In 2000, a plaque was mounted outside a lavender-painted house in northwest London, commemorating the time when Sylvia Plath had lived and worked there. Plath’s daughter, Frieda Hughes, presided over the unveiling at the home she had only briefly known (she was born in the bedroom). She was stunned by its size. The kitchen was two paces long. The bedroom was so small, she said, “It wasn’t possible to swing a gerbil.”

In her introduction to the second volume of Plath’s collected letters, Frieda Hughes marvels that her mother and her father, the poet Ted Hughes, were able to work and start a family in such tight quarters. The “stifling proximity” is her partial explanation for why the marriage so famously imploded — Hughes went off with another woman and Plath, left to fend for two small children, killed herself.

To write about the House of Hughes is to share that feeling of constriction — of standing in the middle of a cramped flat. There is little room to maneuver, few possible steps to take. Everything seems to have been said in the poems, journals, biographies and snowdrift of scholarship — and now these volumes of letters, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil, totaling more than 2,000 pages.

Image Credit... Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times

The first volume, published last year, revealed the young Plath, from summer camp to Smith College, intent on two goals: to flay herself into becoming a writer and to marry — to give a man “this colossal reservoir of faith and love for him to swim in daily, and to give him children; lots of them, in great pain and pride,” she wrote in her journals. In this new book of letters, written between 1956 and 1963, ending a week before Plath’s death, at 30, we see the goals triumphantly and tragically fulfilled.