PAGES and notes from an unpublished novel by the poet Sylvia Plath, inspired by her tempestuous relationship with Ted Hughes, have been discovered in crates of documents left by the late poet laureate.

The papers relate the life and loves of an American girl who moves to London to “find herself” and marries her poet lover. Some consist of notes jotted by Plath on the back of writings by Hughes, while others are typed passages.

The discovery of the papers has been welcomed by experts, many of whom believed the book had been burnt or did not exist at all. “It’s extraordinary, I heard rumours, but I didn’t know Ted had the papers,” said Elizabeth Sigmund, a close friend of Plath until her suicide in 1963. “I really thought what he’d described as fragments were the most we’d ever get.”

Some of the remains of the book will be shown as part of an exhibition of Hughes’s and Plath’s papers entitled No Other Appetite: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and the Blood Jet of Poetry, which opens on Wednesday at the Grolier Club in New York.

The documents and books come from the Hughes archive at Emory University, Atlanta, and the Plath archive at Smith College in Massachusetts.

The title of the novel, Falcon Yard, refers to the place in Cambridge where Plath met and famously bit Hughes, her future husband. The book, on which Plath worked between 1957 and 1959, was to have been a fictionalisation of their life together. Many of the scenes depicted were also described by Hughes in Birthday Letters, the sequence of poems to Plath published in 1998.

The two and a half tons of letters, poems, drafts and proofs had been stored for years in champagne and seed boxes in a barn at Hughes’s home in Devon. Despite references in Plath’s journals, biographers were unsure how much of it she had written. What survives is from two chapters entitled Venus in the Seventh and Hill of Leopards.

The material was discovered in 1999 by a team working for Stephen Enniss, director of special collections at Emory University, where the manuscripts are stored. The first clue came in a list of characters in Plath’s handwriting on the reverse of a radio play by Hughes.

The name Richard Sassoon, Plath’s first love and a distant relative of Siegfried Sassoon, the English war poet, leapt off the page. Over the next weeks a page, sometimes two or three together, would turn up on the back of unrelated work by Hughes, with a sense of the novel gradually coming into focus. The discovery is being made public now to coincide with the exhibition.

“I didn’t think very much was left at all. That’s what the letters said and I trusted that,” said Elaine Feinstein, Hughes’s biographer. “It is intriguing and very exciting. Her mother always contended there was much more. I’m delighted.”

The novel was to have been what Plath described as “a fable of faithfulness”, the heroine “kinetic, a voyager, no Penelope” and the hero, Gerald — the name of Hughes’s real-life brother — “Pan”.

While The Bell Jar, her most famous work, was a novel of unresolved questions, Falcon Yard was to have been a novel of answers, ending with the couple marrying.

The American girl at the centre of the story “stays a year, goes through great depression in winter”, wrote Plath in her journal. “She runs through several men — a femme fatale in her way: types: little thin exotic wealthy Richard [Sassoon]; combine Gary and Gordon; Richard and Lou Healy [all previous boyfriends of Plath]. Safe versus not safe. And of course: the big, blasting dangerous love.”

Plath writes of her heroine’s experiences in Venice and Rome, desperate to return to the gloom of London and an English poet, “his voice. UnBritish. Refugee Pole rather, mixed with something of Dylan Thomas: rich and mellow-noted: half sung”.

The heroine believes marriage can erase the severe depression to which she, and Plath, had always been prone.

The marriage of Plath and Hughes ran into trouble in 1961, a year after their daughter Frieda was born. In 1962 Hughes began an affair with Assia Wevill, who was of Russian and German background and worked in advertising. Plath killed herself the next year.

Falcon Yard was meant to be a gift to her new husband and a romantic comedy — a bestseller that would make them enough money to be able to get on with writing poetry.

The mythologising of their relationship began in Plath's writing and in the young couple’s sense of themselves as great poets in the making. “What these papers illustrate more clearly is what a terrible loss to her he was [when he left her],” said Sigmund. “There was a supposition that it [Falcon Yard] had been burnt. She burnt a lot of things.”

By 1959, Plath’s attention was turning increasingly to poetry. At a retreat in America, she wrote one of her most important sequences, Poem for a Birthday. Of her early verses, these are most like the Ariel poems for which she later became famous. Later that year the Hugheses moved to London and work on Falcon Yard was never seriously resumed.

Additional reporting:
Holly Watt

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