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To celebrate 90 years of Faber publishing, the company is releasing a “landmark” series of individually bound short stories to present “the best of fiction”. Authors include Dublin University alumni Samuel Beckett and Sally Rooney, but its most anticipated addition is a rediscovered Sylvia Plath short story written when the poet was twenty years old and an undergraduate at Smith College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The story itself is told in third person, documenting the protagonist, Mary Ventura’s, experience on a train en route to the Ninth Kingdom, a place from which “no one ever leaves”. Plath described the story as “a vaguely symbolic tale” and such allegory and metaphor of a young woman embarking on a literal and figurative journey does become obvious and unambitious.

The descriptions do not make an impression on the reader and at times the plot feels forced and unmotivated. Nameless characters and stock descriptions (such as the stoic father and smothering mother) make it clear to any reader of Plath’s later work that the quality of this story is of a talent on the rise, not a literary legend on her top form.

However, the work is recognisably of Plath and is imbued with themes that would eventually dominate her work such as malevolent societal conduct and the determination to penetrate darkness with the hope of finding light. As in her most successful works, Plath attempts to write simple yet striking truths and while she gets close (a blunt yet unambitious line being “Everyone has to leave home sometime. Everyone has to go away sooner or later”), Plath does not reach any exceptional understanding of grief or maturity. Any observations or commentary on societal issues are alluded to rather than identified and developed upon throughout the story.

The main attraction to ‘Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom’ is the same interest the reader is left with having finished the story: what were the abilities of Plath like in their infancy? The answer is granted.

Plath’s genius was hard-earned and crafted.

Standing alone, the story is unremarkable, but when read in the development of Plath’s literary corpus it offers a glance at a writer starting out and playing with the tools she would use later to create the works which would define a decade.