A cache of Sylvia Plath’s letters and personal items – including her wedding ring, a captioned photo album and her drawings of Ted Hughes – are to be sold at Sotheby’s in a sale which provides unique insight into the life of one of the most celebrated literary figures in the English language. Sotheby’s is hosting the 55-lot auction, which includes some of the most personal Plath items ever sold, including intimate pieces such as the Plath family Bible and letters between herself and Hughes, with whom she had one of literature’s most famous relationships. Dr Gabriel Heaton, Sotheby’s English literature and historical manuscripts specialist, said the sale, which opens on 9 July, is without precedent and the items sold by the Plath family show Plath’s creative development, her love for Hughes and her sense of humour. The 32 letters are made up of those written to Hughes in October 1956 and others she sent to her in-laws up until 1961. Heaton says the letters are not only desirable objects but offer an insight into several elements of Plath’s life. Heaton said: “Here you have the beginning of this relationship when she is deeply, deeply in love. She’s wonderfully excited about their union and about the future. But also you get such a strong sense of their literary collaboration and how they’re working together and thinking together.” The letters also include Plath encouraging the then mostly unknown Hughes to enter the prestigious Harper’s poetry contest. When Hughes went on to win the competition in 1957, with a collection that included The Hawk in the Rain, it helped launch his career. Another standout piece is a family photo album, captioned by Plath which records her and Hughes’s road trip across America with images of fishing trips in Yellowstone Lake and excursions with friends, including TS Eliot. It covers the period from straight after their honeymoon, right through to their final year in Devon, and is described by Heaton as an “intimate, domestic photo album”. “There are lots of photographs of the time they spent on the road trip in America which is very heavily recalled by Ted Hughes in Birthday Letters, for example. In terms of a portrait of their marriage, it’s really a very beautiful thing,” he added. There are also a set of tarot cards, given as a gift to Plath by Hughes, an Egyptian figurine given by Hughes to Plath on their honeymoon and drawings of Hughes by Plath as the pair honeymooned in Benidorm. Other lots include an embossed rolling pin and chopsticks Hughes gifted to Plath. The comical side of Plath’s personality is also on show. There are her letters which reveal her contempt for life at Cambridge, and a cartoon that shows her disdain for domestic life with the poet drawing a scene depicting herself as a maid attacking a dinner guest with an axe. Plath – whose relationship with Hughes broke down before her suicide in 1963 – has been reexamined recently with the academic Heather Clark’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated biography of the poet, Red Comet, attempting to turn the attention away from the “mythmaking and cultural baggage” and focus on her work and poetry.