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out behind the farmhouse, puttering
Right away I went downstairs to find Dad. He was out behind the farmhouse, puttering around the garden.
“Well, daughter?” he asked when he saw I wanted to talk to him. Then he noticed the tear-strains on my face and asked what was wrong.
“Dad,” I said, struggling to hold back the tears, “Dad, Phil Forester is dead ... killed ... over in Korea ...”
— Sylvia Plath (1932-63), “I Lied for Love” in Peter K. Steinberg, ed., The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath (Faber, 2024) : 197-228 : 225
google books preview : link
summary —
Jenny Martin has been seeing Phil Forester, hiding this from her father, a farmer. Forester’s family is wealthy and socially prominent; Phil represents access to a larger, more glamorous life. Phil is drafted, leaves (after promising marriage at some future time). She sees notice in the newspaper that he has been killed in Korea. She decides to come clean to her father (having tried, and failed, a few times before), and announces that Phil is dead, and that she will have (and keep) Phil’s baby. Dad responds by having a seizure; the doctor reports that nothing can be done. Before he dies, Dad reveals the true story about her mother — that she’d not died, but run off with a traveling-stock actor, with whom she dies in an auto accident on their way out of town.
Ivan, the foreman to whom Dad has decided to leave the farm (given Jenny’s disinterest), has always loved Jenny and is happy to marry her (and she, him).
This is only the barest thumbnail sketch of a moralistic and melodramatic story with many aspects (male violence, family secrets, shame, ambition among them). It was written by a 21 year-old Sylvia Plath, probably as an exercise for True Story a “confessions” magazine, or with it in mind; it was not published. Typescript (dated 4-7 April 1953), at the Lilly Library.
The story brings to this mind Susan Glaspell her novel Brook Evans (1928).
reviews (of the collection, not the story) —
by Fiona Sampson, in Literary Review : link
Heather Clark, “Good vile words; Sylvia Plath’s unpublished short stories reveal her passionate dedication to her craft”
TLS (October 18, 2024) : link (paywall)