(False) portrait of the artist as a woman: Editorial strategy in the diaries of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath

Abstract

This thesis contends that, in the process of publication of the diaries of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, their husbands, Leonard Woolf and Ted Hughes, employed editorial strategies that created false portraits of the authors. Each of these men tantalized readers with the possibility of reading the 'truth' of these women's lives, but they edited their texts in ways that would minimize readers' understanding of Plath and Woolf while maximizing the benefits they would collect as heirs of the authors' literary estates. These examples are typical of a larger pattern in which women's private writings are edited by family and/or friends of the author in an effort to gain control of the author's public personae.