In the February 2018 issue of The New Criterion I wrote that

Plath did not just love her brother Warren, as she reiterates in these letters, she impressed upon him how both of them were part of a family enterprise that their mother had established. This eighteenth-century sense of fealty is quite astounding and not quite like anything else you can read in the lives of modern American writers.

I called Volume I of Plath’s letters Pamela redux, after the Samuel Richardson novel, since it seemed to Plath that her virtue had been rewarded, that a marriage to Ted Hughes fulfilled all of her aspirations. She had held out for a hero commensurate with her high ambitions, and a man, she believed, committed to creating a large family. She wanted at least four children, she declared, and was still planning on having the next two when Hughes declared independence—no longer wishing to be the home husband who had shared in the care of two-year-old Frieda and baby Nicholas. In the seven months leading to Plath’s suicide, when the estranged couple engaged in their tormented struggle to establish new lives for themselves, she continued to write to her mother in Massachusetts and implore Warren or his new wife to join her. She had made a life and career for herself in London, and to her a return to the States signaled defeat. But she needed her family, although not her overly protective mother. Plath did not want smothering