In November 2004 Frieda Hughes issued a new edition of Sylvia Plath's best-known collection. Ariel: The Restored Edition (subtitled ‘A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement’) embodies, while attempting to lay to rest, debates about the status of this work. Ariel: The Restored Edition presents for the first time the sequence of poems in the order Plath herself seems to have intended. The volume includes a foreword by Frieda, a facsimile of Plath's complete typescript and a copy of working drafts of the title poem. I will refer to this edition as relevant in the discussion below and in particular when considering the late poems which, according to the first typescript of Ariel (now held at Smith College library) were part of Plath's original arrangement, though omitted from the first edition. However, the bulk of my argument will be based on my reading of the first published version. This is the Ariel that, for forty years, has been circulated, studied and discussed and the version which Plath criticism has, until now, taken as its focus.

The poems of the first edition of Ariel were mostly written, as Ted Hughes indicates in his introduction to the Collected Poems, between July and Christmas of 1962. In a letter of 16 October 1962, Plath calls them the best poems of her life; poems which ‘will make my name’ (LH 468).