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Indexing is a quantitative enterprise—at least the way I do it. I don’t use an index program, just a search box, to find mentions of key words and phrases. In the index for volume one of , I have over 100 entries on shopping—by herself, with her mother, with boyfriends, with a boyfriend’s mother, with girlfriends, with her grandparents, with the children she babysat.

Shopping was essential for her well being on trips to Filene’s and Bloomingdale’s, for example. Volume two, which tracks her life right up to its final days, contains another 100+ entries for shopping. Shopping lifted her spirits as much as horseback riding, baking, and gardening did.



She talked with shop clerks and created a community of interest—in Wellesley, Boston, New York, London, and in the small Devon town she settled in with Ted Hughes, and where their marriage fell apart after she banished the unfaithful husband from the home and family life she thought he treasured as much as she did. So far as I can determine Ted Hughes never went shopping with Sylvia Plath. He thought her flair for fashion, and her materialistic desires, frivolous.

“I need to curb my lust for buying dresses,” she wrote to herself on May 9, 1958 while the married couple were living in Northampton, Massachusetts. Four years later, on her own in London during her last days, she shopped like mad, threw away her country duds, reveled in a new hairdo, and enjoyed wolf whistles on the street. She had repressed a good deal .

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