Exclusive Sylvia Plath extract: Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom

Written on the brink of a tumultuous year, this short story by 20-year-old Plath captures a journey towards oblivion

A young woman is hustled on to a train by her parents bound for a destination known only as the Ninth Kingdom. An ominous pall of smoke hangs over a landscape dotted with abandoned settlements where the train no longer stops. “It’s the forest fires,” a fellow passenger tells her. “The smoke always blows down from the north this time of year.” Full of little nods towards the uncanny, it could almost be the opening of a Stephen King novel, but “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom” is a short story by Sylvia Plath, which was rejected by a magazine when she was a 20-year-old student and has remained largely unseen until now.

The story will be published next week by Faber, as part of a series of standalone short fiction titles marking the publisher’s 90th anniversary. At the time of writing, Plath was a scholarship student at Smith College, Massachusetts, where – far from “splitting open at my feet like a ripe, juicy watermelon”, as she famously wrote to her mother at the start of her degree – the literary world was not opening up anywhere near fast enough for her.

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from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2Svt5DK

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