Sylvia Plath Hughes

There will surely be some surprise if Birthday Letters, about Hughes's relationship with Sylvia Plath, is not named Book of the Year, and not because Hughes, so recently dead, will get a sympathy vote; the popularity of the work made publishing history. Of course, there was a voyeuristic element in the interest too - readers wanted to look inside a relationship which had long remained clouded in mystery.

Leaving all that aside, what has to be of interest is whether there will be freer access to Plath's estate in the wake of Hughes's death. He was, surely, always too close to her to be a good editor of her work; he famously "lost" the late volume of her journals, and oversaw the publication of what was left, allowing it see the light of day only in the US. There is talk of it being issued on this side of the Atlantic, and hopefully it will be a different edition, free of some of the emendations which his co-editor, Frances McCullough, told us, were to calm Plath's eroticism, "which was very intense". Mercy me! Enquiries to Faber only elicited the comment from a PR woman: "I don't want to say anything I'm not supposed to."