Links, reviews, etc. - Week ending 16 August 2008

There is a new page on A celebration, this is. The new page is an index of known works by Sylvia Plath. Listed are all poems and prose (non-fiction and fiction) that I could find. Plus, there are a couple of poems referred to in sources but otherwise unknown. The page is located in the bibliographies section and I hope that you find it useful. If you know of a work not listed, please contact me via email.
The first volume of Plath Profiles was published on Sunday 10 August, 2008.* It features really wonderful essays, poems, reviews, and artwork from a widely international group of scholars. Most of the essays were presented at the Sylvia Plath 75th Year Symposium at Oxford in October 2007 (and/or at Smith College in April 2008), but some are original, too. One step forward...
Plath Profiles deeply apologizes for any inconvenience, however, it was necessary to make some editorial changes to Barbara Mossberg's Introduction to Elizabeth Gray's Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath. Please re-save or re-print this if you want the most up-to-date version, which was uploaded this morning (16 August 2008) at 10:00, eastern US time. We do not seek to make a habit of this.
Plath Profiles is currently accepting papers, poems, etc. for its second volume. If you are a high school or college student, writer, scholar, artist, or general fan of Sylvia Plath's, please consider submitting your work to Plath Profiles. Submission guidelines and deadlines and contacts and other information are all available through the link in the preceding paragraph.
Susan Basalla May interviewed novelist Joanne Rendell in the 12 August 2008 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Keep your eyes peeled in 2009 for Rendell's second novel which "explores the high/low-culture debate through a standoff between two female protagonists: one a Sylvia Plath scholar, the other a scholar of popular fiction." It sounds like a good read.
There is going to be a movie made from Jennifer O'Kieffe's screenplay "Sex and Sylvia Plath." The movie is about "a death-obsessed 16-year-old who loses her virginity to a teenager, only to discover that her mother is also having an affair with him." The screenplay won the 52nd annual Samuel Goldwyn writing award in 2007 and has been called one of the "hottest unproduced screenplays." Two steps back?

*Astute Plath scholars may recognize that 10 August is the day in which Plath's first poem appeared in 1941.

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove

Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last

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