Skip to main content

The Harriet Rosenstein Sylvia Plath archive, Update

The internet got an interesting story yesterday and today in "Unseen Sylvia Plath letters claim domestic abuse by Ted Hughes" authored by Danuta Kean of The Guardian which saw "Ted Hughes" trending on Twitter. Today, it's "#NationalGrilledCheeseDay".

Ms Kean contacted me through a friend and we discussed the sudden presence of the Harriet Rosenstein Sylvia Plath archive which I blogged about on 10 March and its disappearance by 18 March. However, Ms Kean uncovered that the archive was removed because of a pending legal concern.

Kean's article was instantly picked up by a number of other news sources, and some of the facts from it were even more quickly transformed into complete untruth.

The following are articles, listed in no particular order, that I have found on it in varying degrees of veracity. If any new articles appear they will be listed below.

Unfortunately at this time I can just compile the stories as they appear. I am not in a position to be able to comment on them.

All links accessed 11 and 12, 16 April 2017.

Comments

  1. After reading Danuta Kean's article yesterday, I've seen a couple more pop up around the internet and I did not even bother to read them, because I imagined that every new one has some additional "juicy" news added to them, especially because some people (teenage girls who just discovered "Lady Lazarus" or The Bell Jar a month ago, in particular) "have always known" that Hughes was a wife beater etc. This really makes me sad because of two reasons: domestic abuse is a truly horrible thing but also because it seems to be a fact all Hughes haters have been waiting for and now the mudslinging can begin (again)!

    In other news, I can't wait for the first volume of The Letters of Sylvia Plath to come out! Sooo incredibly exciting! :)

    Cheers!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anna, Hi there. I'm really excited that you're excited for the Letters book. We've put so much work into it hundreds if not thousands of hours over the last 7 years. So it'll be a thrill to have it out finally, so that you and others can read what we have read.

    I too found the subsequent articles lacking; so many facts were distorted, invented, and wrong. Which makes journalism in general really disappointing.

    ~pks

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...

Some final photographs of Sylvia Plath

Susan O'Neill-Roe took a series of photographs of Sylvia Plath and her children from October to late November (or maybe early December) 1962 while she was a day nanny/mother's help at Court Green. From nearby Belstone , it was a short drive to North Tawton and the aid she provided enabled Plath to complete the masterful October and November poems and also to make day or overnight trips to London for poetry business and other business.  Some of O'Neill-Roe's photographs are well-known.  However, a cache of photographs formed a part of the papers of failed biographer Harriet Rosenstein. They were sold separately from the rest of her papers that went to Emory. I was fortunate enough to see low resolution scans of them a while back so please note these are being posted today as mere reference quality images.  There are two series here. The first of the children with Plath dressed in red and black. (This should be referred to in the future, please, as Plath's  Stendhal-c...

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...