"In the 80s, Plath became a kind of feminist symbol of a victim, of what men can do to women; and the torment she endured is certainly part of the fascination for some. Not just in her life, or in her poetry, but after her death - since she was still legally married to Hughes, he inherited the Plath estate and was either careless with her work or protective of others' (and his own) feelings, depending on your view. He rearranged Plath's order of the poems in Ariel, for example, and added some of her bleakest at the end, such as Edge, which begins: "The woman is perfected./Her dead/Body wears the smile of accomplishment." Plath's order, on the other hand, was more hopeful - it began with the word "love" and ended with "spring". Hughes burned Plath's last journal, "lost" another, similarly "lost" an unfinished novel and instructed that a collection of Plath's papers should not be released until 2013. Her friends say that the victim image foisted on to Plath in the 80s never really fitted the woman, that Hughes was madly in love with her (as his near-death publication of Birthday Letters showed), and that she and Hughes in fact had an unusually equal relationship; but that is not to deny that being a woman and a writer in the 50s was difficult."
Sylvia Plath

January 1, 1970