What seems the most logical explanation for Plath's enigmatic relationship with her parents is not that one or the other was her demon, but that due to circumstance she remained psychologically dependent on and victimized by both of them. Her father's death left her not only with a hoard of unresolved grief, but it also left her defenseless against her mother's unintended vampirish harm. She had only her mother to rely on until she began a second symbiotic relationship with Hughes. Plath's depressions and rages, her restlessness and feeling of entrapment seem appropriate reactions, at least to a degree, to her family situation.

What is still hard for many of her readers to believe is that such an intuitive, perceptive and nuanced person as Sylvia Plath, who had at her disposal so many interior tools to understand her own traumas, would ultimately self-destruct. Yet the journals show, now more than ever, the extent to which she grappled helplessly with her high-strung emotional life, how tortured she was by her own intensity despite her desire to cultivate her "weirdness" and transform it into art. What is most constant about her inconstant emotions is her attempts to wrestle them down, to find a plane on which she could exist in relative psychic comfort.

There is a palpable urgency, even a poignant heroism, to Plath's mission to understand -- and to control by sheer self-discipline -- her uncontrollable moods. The 1982 journals were not lax in highlighting this theme; "God, is this all it is," Plath wrote in 1950, "the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust?" And in 1951: "I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad." And in 1958: "I have been, and am, battling depression. It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative -- which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it."

Numerous times after her marriage Plath warned herself to learn to manage her own emotions, to keep her problems to herself, to "not tell Ted" despite her all-consuming neediness and her sense of his soothing effect on her nerves; in the unabridged journals, ironically just a month before the disillusioning May 1958 co-ed incident, Plath wrote of Hughes, "He is ... my pole-star centering me steady & right."

Despite Plath's brittle hope that determination alone could steer her ungovernable emotions, the real key to her lifelong struggle with her mind may lie in a little-noticed medical theory -- one that does not just shed light on her poetic obsessions, but that allows us to see something few have observed in the life of this scrutinized, tortured, impossible, frighteningly brilliant writer: courage.

Part 2 of "The real Sylvia Plath": Did PMS kill Plath?

Hear Sylvia Plath read "November Graveyard" and other poems.

Hear actress Frances McDormand read from Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"