I did it, I: The Afterlife of Sylvia Plath's Journals, 1956-2003

This essay challenges what Sarah Cardwell calls the ‘centre-based model of adaptation’ by reinstating a chain of literary texts between a passage in Emma Tennant’s The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted (2001) and the entry in Sylvia Plath’s journals that is Tennant’s ostensible source. By demonstrating that the intervening works are intertextual and adaptive and that the journals themselves adapt lived experience, the essay contributes to the troubling of “originality” as an appropriate critical standard. It concludes that the act of adaptation enhances the aura surrounding the extratextual event by appending a mythological status, renewed with each successive adaptation.