It's not the "true self" of Sylvia Plath that comes rushing at you with vivid immediacy -- at least not the true self as Hughes defined it, a Plath distilled into pure, ferocious, luminous essence. Nor is it the vague, half-glimpsed Sylvia Plath of the earlier journals, whose longings and crises and furies didn't quite add up. Instead, it is the IMAX version of Sylvia Plath who appears from the very first pages of the journals -- the exaggerated, high-voltage, bigger-than-life personality and imagination that no one, not a single one of her detractors or friends, has denied was consistently evident (if frequently hard to take) in the flesh. This feverish Sylvia Plath floods the reader's senses as her own were flooded throughout her life: on wave after wave of ecstatic or crashing experience, on sparkling details she seems helpless, at every moment, to ignore. "Eyes pulled up like roots" is how the poet Anne Carson characterized Plath, and the image carries its shock of authenticity. "I've talked to alumni who knew Plath," says Kukil, "and they say that everything she did was at the same intense level. Everything she did, she experienced to the hilt." "It's getting so I live every moment with terrible intensity," she wrote to pen pal Ed Cohn in 1950.

Twenty years ago, it may have seemed to Hughes and McCullough that preserving Plath's rush of quotidian detail -- the icebox cheesecakes she immortalized, the epiphany over a story in Cosmopolitan magazine that gave her the idea to write "The Bell Jar" ("I must write one about a college girl suicide ... There is an increasing market for mental-health stuff."), her obsessive bemusement about dog shit, the noting of the cold water and salt in which were soaked the sheets bloodied by her newborn son's afterbirth, the 54 descriptions of what the moon looked like that minute -- would diminish the impact of her unique genius in the journals rather than enhance it.

The opposite is true: It is the most ordinary details of Plath's daily life that now give her such astonishing depth and balance and make her seem, within the thrum of her intensity, refreshingly sane and vibrant. Teeming as they are with prescient observations and, as Plath puts it, "foolishness," the unabridged journals are no less her artistic "Sargasso" for the jumble of her "gabbling" -- they are, in fact, more so. Plath's is a personality integrated by cumulative effect. The details pull forward not just toward the poems, but toward a fuller and more distinct picture of the woman who wrote them: They add immeasurably to Plath's artistic and psychological stature.

Even so, there are many passages whose previous excisions are understandable, lines and whole entries redolent with the whiff of taboo of one kind or another. Hilarious as it is to envision now, no doubt Hughes didn't relish the idea of letting it be known that Plath had in 1958 -- after he'd won the attention of W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Marianne Moore with his first book -- entered their poems in jingles contests run by food companies: "the dole pineapple & heinz ketchup contests close this week, but the French's mustard, fruit-blended oatmeal & slenderella & Libby-tomato juice contests don't close till the end of May. We stand to win five cars, two weeks in Paris, a year's free food, and innumerable iceboxes & refrigerators and all our debts paid. Glory glory." Some of the 1982 cuts were simply Plath's caustic sniping and thinly disguised jealousies -- there is a wonderfully sulky account of a lunch with fellow poets, drooling unattractive babies, and spilled tea that ends "Too much salt in a fruit salad. We ate, grumpily, and left."

Much has been made of the journal episode of May 19 to 22, 1958, in which Plath records her shock and disgust at her discovery of Hughes' feet of clay. On that day, her last day of teaching at Smith, Plath and Hughes had made plans to meet after her last class. When Hughes didn't show, Plath had "an intuitive vision" that she would see him walking with a college girl on the campus; not only was she right, but the girl literally ran away and Hughes made no attempt to introduce her. Because the 1982 version of the journals left quite enough material to make Hughes look like a cad if not a downright adulterer and further piqued suspicions by inserting numerous [OMISSION] flags that glowed malignantly within the passage, many readers and critics have understandably assumed that the elisions would point directly to Hughes' infidelity.

Instead, the reinstated omissions make clear that what really upset Plath was Hughes' open display of vanity -- that on her special day, he put his own ego (only figuratively stroked by the fleeing, thick-legged co-ed in Bermuda shorts) ahead of hers. Hughes, "whose vanity is not dead, but thrives," "a liar and a vain smiler," definitely comes out looking all too human, but the edited version had made him seem truly sinister. It's ironic that in this memorable instance Hughes cut references to his vanity (and his saggy pants and greasy hair and the universally condemnable smarminess of his "heavy ham act ... 'Let's make up'") presumably in order to assuage his self-regard, and yet by doing so he planted in the minds of Plath's readership the seeds of his early-and-often abuse of Plath's faith in him.

The journals were Plath's magic cauldron, the receptacle where she stewed the observations that would help her give shape to her life in its myriad desired guises. It can be seen burbling away in her eavesdropping on an adult cocktail party at the summer home of the Mayos, a family for whom she worked as a mother's helper during the summer of 1951: "What were they talking about? What was the subtle line that marked you from entering a group such as this? ... I can hear the voices coming up to me, laughter, raveled words. Up here, on the second floor porch, the air blurs the syllables and continuity of conversation like sky-writing ..."

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