Seeking reviews of Letters Home I found in the Sydney (AU) Morning Herald, April 3, 1976, page 18, a review by novelist Jill Neville titled "The Sylvia Plath Industry." Neville didn't say who her "great friend" of Plath's was, but it was Al Alvarez; Neville was his girlfriend from 1960 to 1962. Neville wrote:
"A great friend of hers was my great friend. I glimpsed those surrounding her at the final drama; even the woman who acted as the detonator of her own life, I knew. She was too fat and not particularly young but when she came into a room men swayed like wheat in an evening breeze. To look into her perfect Russian-Jewish face was to hear a singing in the ears."
I misunderstood her to be saying Plath was fat and not young and had a Russian-Jewish face. I found it puzzling that Neville would so describe her. The "She" is Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes's "other woman" who in 1976 could not be publicly named.