The story starts with Mary Ventura, ready to board the train, and her parents assuring her everything is going to be alright once she gets to the end of this trip, once she gets to The Ninth Kingdom. At first, she isn't sure that she's ready to take this trip in the first place but her mother tells her that everyone has to leave sometimes, be it sooner or later, so she agreed to her words and boarded the train.
When she settled safely in her seat, she got to meet a lovely woman who will become her companion and eventually someone of great importance.
As the train goes from station to station, we learn that this is the trip a woman takes very often and knows something Mary doesn't; what is The Ninth Kingdom. At some point, when Mary asked her, she said: "You will be happier if you do not know. It is really not bad, once you get there. The trip is long down the tunnel, and the climate changes gradually. The hurt is not intense when one is hardened to the cold. Look out the window. Ice has begun to form on the subway walls, and no one has even noticed or complained." Mary seemed horrified by this tale and regrets that she took the trip she didn't know anything about and exclaim she won't go there. A woman then tells her: "There are no return trips on this line. Once you get to The Ninth Kingdom, there is no going back. It is the kingdom of negation, of the frozen will. It has many names."

The story itself is very confusing and dark, and Plath didn't offer any certainty either for her characters or readers.

This was my first read of the story which I finished within 20 minutes because there are only 64 pages and I didn't spend the time to over analyze it. I do have one thought of what The Ninth Kingdom could be. My thought is that it could possibly be the 9th circle of hell. We know that in Dante's Inferno there are 9 circles of hell. The last Ninth Circle of Hell is divided into 4 Rounds according to the seriousness of the sin. Though all residents are frozen in an icy lake. Those who committed more severe sin are deeper within the ice (just like a woman on the train described the Ninth Kingdom "The hurt is not intense when one is hardened to the cold. Look out the window. Ice has begun to form on the subway walls, and no one has even noticed or complained. It is the kingdom of negation, of the frozen will."). Then she also said The Ninth Kingdom has many names as we know the 9th circle of hell is divided into 4 rounds, according to the seriousness of the sin. Each of the 4 Rounds is named after an individual who personifies the sin so yeah, there's that.

At the end of the story, Mary managed to escape with help of a woman before she reached the Ninth Kingdom. She asks a woman to come with her but she replies that she can't, she needs to break herself but to be certain they will meet again. And I think they did meet even though Mary thought it will be impossible. Once she reached what was described as awakening from a sleep of death, she saw a woman selling flowers on the street corner. When she approached her she lifted her head and met Mary's eyes with a blue gaze of triumphant love and said she was waiting for her. At the beginning of the book, a woman from the train had blue eyes.

Anyway, the story had an interesting concept and I'm sure if this is written at the time Plath was an experienced writer, it would definitely become as great as her "The Bell Jar" novel. I really needed better character and story development which couldn't be expected from someone who is at the very beginning of a writing career I guess.

I didn't like that the story was too short and like that is missing better characters' development. The ending was cut short as well. It wasn't a cliffhanger, the resolution was there but it was pretty much confusing as though the reader doesn't get the full idea what happened to the main character. I suppose if the story is longer it would satisfy the reader's expectations. Like this, it only lightened up the fire that was extinguished way too soon.

Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. Her books include the poetry collections The Colossus, Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, Ariel, and The Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Plath is credited with being a pioneer of the 20th-century style of writing called confessional poetry. Her poem "Daddy" is one of the best-known examples of this genre.

I read "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath last year and when I compare the two, I can see her growth as a writer within 10 years. Although I don't think it's fair to compare a novel and a short story that is "Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom", it feels fair to say it is obvious why the story was rejected when submitted to a magazine. If you never came across any other Plath's novels/poetry you might find this story very poorly written and you would probably be right about it because it's missing so, so much of the content one story deserves to have. I do, however, recognize the amount of strangeness in this story which can be seen in late Plath's work. I would say this is her, learning to be a great writer. Even the great ones were beginners once so I'm pretty content to see the process of Sylvia Plath herself. I would recommend this book but only to those who are familiar with late Plath's work.

"Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom" was written by Sylvia Plath in 1952, when she was a student at Smith College. The real-life Mary Ventura was one of Plath's high-school friends. Plath had written an earlier story about her, as part of a creative writing assignment in her second year at Smith. That story, largely autobiographical, concerned a pair of old school friends who met during the holidays, and shared nothing with this one except Ventura's name. In December 1952 she finished writing this story- a 'vague symbolic tale', in her own description- and submitted it for publication to "Mademoiselle" magazine, whose writing prize she had recently won. It was rejected. Almost two years later, Plath revised the story, changing its title to "Marcia Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom", making it less sinister, then curtailing it so significantly as to make it appear half-finished. The version used here is the original rejected work- the richest, and in Harper's view, the best. This is the first publication. All original spellings have been retained. Excerpt from the book

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Created Feb 05, 2019 at 11:59am • Submit your own review...