Related to that is her "hatred" of men, oft-cited by critics. That hatred now appears more accurately as an envy borne of the frustratingly confining '50s-era sexual mores that made it impossible for Plath to seek the experiences she wanted, to be as sexually free in her thought and actions as men could be. Plath also easily articulates the polarity between her desire to mother versus her protectiveness of her professional ambition -- belying the theory circulated in some circles that Plath's ambivalence toward motherhood was not quite normal.

The unexpurgated 1957 to '59 entries reveal the depth of Plath's awkwardness with people, as opposed to the outward "golden girl" gaiety typically ascribed to her. While teaching at Smith, Plath instituted a program to compel herself to interact. "People: eyes & ears not shut, as they are now," she coached herself, "I apart, aware of apartness & a strange oddity that makes my coffee-shop talk laughable -- we are inviting people to dinner: four a week, 16 a month: I shall not go sick or nervous or over-effusive ..."

Throughout the early years of the journals, Plath's lack of experience is sometimes cringingly obvious, her early attempts at hammering the episodes of her life into fictional or poetic shape hilariously sophomoric. During her college years, Plath often recorded her life in scenes addressing herself as "you" or in a frequently self-congratulatory third person: "Outwardly, all one could see on passing by is a tan, long-legged girl in a white lawn chair, drying her light brown hair ... Tonight she will dress in the lovely white sharkskin hand-me-down dress of last summer's employer and gaze winningly at her entranced Princeton escort ..." On the occasion of the end of a brief infatuation, Plath threw herself with full intensity into a melodramatic chunk of doggerel:

The slime of all my yesterdays
Rots in the hollow of my skull:
And if my stomach would contract
Because of some explicable phenomenon
Such as pregnancy or constipation
I would not remember you.

She was not unaware of her early failures. In fact, wherever the craft of writing was at issue Plath was notoriously hard on herself. But what the young Plath lacked in experience she made up for in imagination and most decidedly in will. At 18, she scolded herself: "I am a victim of introspection. If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowing inward, I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be. Yet I am hypnotized by the workings of the individual, alone, and am continually using myself as a specimen." Her journals are rife with her exhortations to get over herself and get on with the work beyond. "God, to lift up the lid of heads," she bemoans in 1958.

And yet despite her constant efforts to "flay" herself into the writer she knew she could be, the most fluid writings in Plath's journals are those in which she is unself-consciously subjective, getting straight to the business of telegraphing her thoughts and feelings without sculpting them into something suitable for the Saturday Evening Post, the Christian Science Monitor, or -- the twin heights of her literary Olympus -- the New Yorker and Ladies' Home Journal.

During a grim winter afternoon at Smith during her teaching year, Plath has coffee alone in the coffee shop of her youth and notices "music souping from jukebox, melancholy, embracing." On a trip to Paris in 1956, Plath writes of walking along the Seine's right bank when a masher in a "lowslung" black car "oozed alongside while he begged me to come for a ride." And three months later, on her honeymoon in Spain, every detail of her notes shimmers with sensory vividness. This makes a perplexing contrast to the handful of short stories she fretted over from that time.

A particularly terrible story idea is the one for "The Day of Twenty-four Cakes," the plot of which emerged during the weeks prior to the dread Smith teaching year, a time when Plath sensed the creative silence her return home was going to impose on her. In the breathless paragraph that outlines the story (Plath characterizes the potential audience as "Either Kafka lit-mag serious or SATEVEPOST aim high"), Plath's heroine sounds like nothing less than a naked reflection of her own desperation: "Wavering between running away or committing suicide: stayed by need to create an order: slowly, methodically begins to bake cakes, one each hour, calls store for eggs, etc. from midnight to midnight. Husband comes home: new understanding."

Plath's stilted admonishments to herself to lift up the world in tweezers and examine it from every angle, to make it "gem-like", "jewel-like", "diamond-edged," "diamond faceted," "jewelled," "gem-bright", "glittering" could not bully her work into taking on those qualities. And yet those qualities, so evident in her later poetry, were quite obviously within her grasp. Her innate gifts, ultimately imposed successfully on her poetry, do indeed exist like gems buried in their crudest form in the journals. In the unintentionally funny 1952 passage "... night thickening, congealing around her in her loneliness and longing like an imprisoning envelope of gelatin ..." one can hear the echo of 1962's "A Birthday Present," in which she repurposed the word "congeal" to much better effect:

... It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center
Where spilt lives congeal and stiffen to history.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"