On Passion and Sylvia Plath Subsequent to Publication of Her Diaries

Keeping a personal diary allows an individual to express her inner world and to reflect on her innermost secrets. From an historical perspective, reading a diary is a journey backward in time, an opportunity to map a life and examine in depth the events that influenced that life. Reading Sylvia Plath's diaries helps us understand this complex personality's convolutions, this great artist's state of mind. Through the poet's narratives, which minutely document her personal history and the thoughts that shaped her personality, there emerges an image of a women who lived as if under a borrowed identity, who passionately yearned for another reality.