Part One: Chapter I Summary and Analysis

Ted Hughes wrote two introductions to "The Journals" of Sylvia Plath. In the early 1982 introduction, Hughes commented how in the last several years of her life, Sylvia had found her true voice as a poet and discarded all the other false ones—the warring "false selves." At the end of this introduction, he made the shocking revelation that he had destroyed some of her last, unpublished journals in order to save her children from reading them. One journal that was not destroyed was lost. In the second version of his introduction, published sometime later in 1982, he hinted that perhaps he could still put his hands on the one journal that was lost—indicating that he may have been less than truthful in his first message. In the second introduction, he indicated that her...