Links, reviews, etc. - Week ending 4 October 2008

A friend of Plath's from Smith, Enid Epstein Mark, passed away this week.
It has been just over a year since Elaine Connell, moderator of the Sylvia Plath Forum and author of Sylvia Plath: Killing the Angel in the House, passed away. Her legacy lives on as a resource to which I still regularly turn and I know she is well loved and missed.
The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath by Jo Gill (Cambridge University Press) is now available through their web site in both hardback (£35.00) and paperback (£10.99) editions. Amazon.co.uk also has this title in stock. The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath is scheduled to be available through Amazon.com (paperback, $19.99) on 31 October.
Plath Profiles is accepting submissions for the 2009 volume. Please click the link and view the submission guidelines. Please email me if you have any questions.
On a similar note, if you have read Volume 1 of Plath Profiles and have responses, comments, questions, or other musings in reaction to the essays - or to the journal in general - please consider submitting them. We seek to create a dialogue between Plath scholars and Plath readers - similar to the Sylvia Plath Forum - but focused on the essays and the journal.
The Letters of Ted Hughes received two reviews, both courtesy of The New York Times. Richard Eder reviews the book in his "Yours Sincerely: A Poet on Fish, Bulls and Love". Gregory Cowles, in Paper Cuts - a blog about books, reviews it briefly in his "Dear Mrs. Plath", which reprints Hugheses first letter to Aurelia Plath after the suicide of Sylvia Plath. The letter was dated 15 March 1963.
Over on the sidebar, there is now a list of those who follow this blog. Thank you to those who have signed on as followers. Others, I'd love to know who you are, too!

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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