SECRETS of Sylvia Plath – the tragic poet inspired by visits to Brontë country – are revealed in a new book.

Fonthill Media is publishing Gail Crowther and Peter K Steinberg’s These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing Of Sylvia Plath.

Steinberg recently met Kirsten Dunst and Dakota Fanning, who star in the movie The Bell Jar, due to be released next year and portraying Plath’s life.

The poet and her then husband, poet Ted Hughes, visited Haworth in 1956 where she compared the local countryside to her beloved ocean. She wrote to her mother: “These moors are really even better, with the great luminous emerald lights changing always, and the animals and wildness.”

Plath sketched Top Withens in the freezing wind, and during a visit to the Brontë Parsonage Museum, admired Charlotte’s watercolours and her siblings’ miniature children’s books.

Crowther and Steinberg’s new book focuses on previously-unpublished material found in archives from around the world.

These Ghostly Archives aims to reconstruct the ghostly figure of Plath via unseen letters, manuscripts, photographs, places and poems.

A spokesman said: “This book approaches archival studies explores both the practical and experiential work carried out in the archive, highlighting the detective-type work it involves and the traces left behind from history. However, for the first time, this work also combines the sociological notion of ‘haunting’ – that is, the archive as a location where researchers haunt the research subject and in turn are haunted by the traces left behind.”

“Never is material culture more powerful than when associated with the dead; never is the archive ghostlier when haunted by the absent presence of Plath.”