Sylvia Plath's Double Exposure

In letters and journal entries from late 1962, Plath described working on a new novel that would follow The Bell Jar. She was living in Devon after separating from Hughes, and the novel drew on her experiences in the village of North Tawton, portraying recognisable local figures in unflattering terms. Plath's mother Aurelia later referred to the manuscript as "Double Exposure" or possibly "Double Take." After Plath's suicide on 11 February 1963, Hughes became executor of her literary estate. In his introduction to Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977), Hughes mentioned that an unfinished novel of 130 pages had existed but "disappeared." In a 1995 Paris Review interview, he said he had destroyed the final volume of Plath's journals, which covered the last months of her life, and strongly implied the novel met a similar fate. Hughes stated he acted to protect their children, Frieda and Nicholas, from the painful autobiographical content. The loss is doubly significant because Plath had intended the novel to demonstrate she was more than a confessional poet — it was to be her breakthrough as a prose writer after the success of The Bell Jar.