Sally Bayley traces Plath’s emerging relationship to her journal persona and creed. Bayley focuses on the intense period of Plath’s late teenage years and early adulthood, including the beginnings of university education. She also reveals the importance of the diarists Plath read to Plath’s own journal activities and larger poetic practices. Of special importance is Virginia Woolf, and Bayley helps us to see afresh Plath’s off-quoted exhilaration at Woolf’s reference to cooking haddock and sausages, which says more about Plath herself than it does the subject of her comments. Bayley shows us how Plath’s ideas about the ‘melting’, emerging self, move from the journals and into poems such as ‘Ariel’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’.