Sylvia Plath and the Mythology of Women Readers

Preface

ix P r e f a c e Anyone hoping to write about Sylvia Plath understands the nature of the path she’s undertaken. According to Ted Hughes, it’s a rather mad path that often leads the critic to her own “mental breakdown, neurotic collapse, domestic catastrophe,” all of which have “saved” him and his family “from several travesties” of literary criticism.1 Only the most “insensitive” of the critics, he added, succeeds. I must admit, these words echoed in my mind throughout the writing of this book, but they got especially loud during the final stages of the book’s production as I set out to secure permissions for the material I wished to quote in making my argument. Like several scholars before me—many of them women, most of them feminist in their perspective—I ran into considerable obstacles as I attempted to acquire permissions. Following the guidelines outlined on Faber and Faber’s website, I sought permission for material written by Ted Hughes (some published, some unpublished) by submitting my request to the estate. At that time, I provided the quoted material in its context, as Faber requested. A month later I was asked to send the entire manuscript electronically, which I immediately did. Five months later, there was still no word from Faber and Faber, despite follow-up e-mails asking for information about the status of my request. I ran into delays trying to get permission for Frieda Hughes’s work as well. While her American publishers granted permission within four months of receiving my request, the permissions I needed from abroad did not come so easily. Months were lost right from the start after I made the mistake of sending my request directly to Ms. Hughes, following the instructions I received from her U.K. publisher. After receiving the correct information from her American publisher, I sent off a second request, only to be told after a month had passed that the information I x p refa ce provided to secure U.S. permissions wouldn’t be sufficient to secure the U.K. permissions. Should I wish to continue with my request, I would need to submit portions of the manuscript. When it became clear that I would have to delay the publication of my book for a second time were I to try again for permission in the one case or wait to hear from Faber and Faber in the other, I made the decision to edit my use of quotations to fit within the Library of Congress’s guidelines for fair use in the United States and the British Society of Authorship’s description of fair dealing in the United Kingdom, following a practice similar to the one Lynda K. Bundtzen adopted in her 2001 book The Other “Ariel.” I am indebted to her leadership on this front, especially her willingness to outline meticulously in the preface to her book her own rationale for cutting or keeping quotation as she did. Like Bundtzen, I had hoped to make significant use of unpublished material, in my case material from letters written by Ted Hughes. Without permission from the estate, I cut down my extensive quotation of this material. But then, just as the manuscript was about to go into the final stages of production, I received word from Faber and Faber that it would grant me permission to use all of the material I wished to include, assuming of course that I could pay the fees associated with the permissions. Because University of Massachusetts Press had some flexibility in its production schedule, I was able to partially restore material from Hughes’s unpublished letters. Without this material, my argument in chapter 4 would have been significantly hamstrung. After all, the exact words are everything in a study of rhetoric. And in the end, I am relieved that all of the time and money invested in my use of Hughes’s archives did not go to waste. While I regret still having to cut some quotation, especially in my discussions of Ted and Frieda Hughes’s poetry, their poems are at least widely available to readers. ...