‘Double Exposure’: The mystery of Sylvia Plath’s missing novel
Sylvia Plath lived a tragically short life, but her legacy looms large. During her lifetime, she published just one poetry collection and one novel, yet her position in literary history far surpasses the quantity of her output. It’s the sheer potency of her artistry that has inspired countless others. However, there was supposed to be another novel for readers to explore.
Throughout her work, Plath’s struggles are well documented. A writer ahead of her time, she found a visceral language through which to write about mental health struggles, heartache and devastation. Her novel, The Bell Jar, dives into a distinct and singular yet relatable feeling of being pulled from the kind of destiny you thought you might have by the pain and trials of life.
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree,” she writes in the novel in a beloved section. “One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet,” she says in the semi-autobiographical work that considers all the different versions of her life she could have lived while dealing with the angst of the one she landed in.
The conflict between a happy home and her calling accounts for a lot of the issues within Plath’s legacy. When the novel was published in 1963, the achievement was subsumed by the devastation found in her home life. Her relationship with Ted Hughes was troubled, worsening her depression as well as leaving her heartbroken due to his affairs. In the final year of her life, the unhappiness of her home life consumed her despite her dreams being achieved in her career. On February 11th, 1963, only a month after her novel’s publication shot her to literary notoriety, Plath committed suicide.
But throughout her struggles, she kept writing. As well as keeping novels and consistently penning her poetry, it’s reported that Plath was working on her second novel after finishing her debut. The person who told the world was none other than her husband, as Hughes wrote in an introduction to a collection of his wife’s stories and journals that she had “typed some 130 pages of another novel, provisionally titled Double Exposure. That manuscript disappeared somewhere around 1970.”
After his wife’s death, Hughes inherited her belongings, including the archive of her work and many journals. Having kept these notepads since childhood, they were the closest thing the world would ever get to an autobiography of the writer or a thorough understanding of her creative mind. But soon after her death, and just like her second novel, one disappeared.
So there’s a history of things disappearing from Plath’s literary pantry. Or, perhaps more honestly, there is a history of wilful destruction? “Two more notebooks survived for a while… The last of these contained entries for several months, and I destroyed it because I did not want her children to have to read it… The other disappeared,” Hughes wrote, owning up to his actions in the introduction to the 1982 edition of The Journals of Sylvia Plath.
Naturally, fans of the writer or her literary friends were absolutely appalled at the fact that Hughes, when entrusted with Plath’s legacy, had literally destroyed portions of it, wiping parts of her work from the world.
But there is something deeper and darker at play. Both the manuscript and the disappearing journal were from 1962. Plath wrote to a friend at the time that the novel was “semi-autobiographical about a wife whose husband turns out to be a deserter and philanderer”, giving an insight into the broken down state of Hughes and Plath’s marriage. It’s likely that the disappearing journal and the one Hughes burnt would have laid their position out even further, revealing the truth of their relationship.
However, Plath and Hughes were still legally married at the time of her death. What’s more, Plath had no will, meaning that everything that was hers went to her husband, handing him not only her belongings and money but also her artistic legacy. If this novel served as a grand exposé, as the title and two completed chapters seen by Plath’s literary executor Olwyn Hughes suggested, they were now Hughes’ to get rid of. So it’s a deeply questionable coincidence that both were never found again…
