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Showing posts from August, 2017

Call for Sylvia Plath Help

If you have been visiting the Sylvia Plath Info Blog for any amount of time, you know that 24 August usually features something relating to Plath's first suicide attempt on that day in 1953. There are many posts "tagged" with "First Suicide Attempt" . I'd encourage you all to click through these posts to see a history of the work I did on building a full bibliography of the articles that I have located. The post I had long intended for this year's anniversary was the announcement that I had transcribed all the articles that I had found to date. But I decided to post that on 1 January as I could not see sitting on that for most of the year. In the past, I have asked for help from readers of this blog to search through their local library's and university's microfilms to see if they can find missing articles. To date, no one has heeded the call. So... I am asking now, again, for some helping in building on the bibliography.  If you

Review of Vivian R. Pollak's Our Emily Dickinsons

Review of Vivian R. Pollak, Our Emily Dickinsons: American Women Poets and the Intimacies of Difference , Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016, pp. 355, $55. ISBN: 987-0-8122-4844-9 Vivian R. Pollak's Our Emily Dickinsons is a rich, intensely researched, and well written exploration of American women poets from Emily Dickinson to Marianne Moore to Sylvia Plath to Elizabeth Bishop . Pollak book takes "roughly one hundred years as its focus, Our Emily Dickinsons describes changing conceptions of Dickinson and the problem for women poets of being cut off from the social experiences which consolidate and affective community, however that community is defined" (8-9). The book also concentrates on other important figures in each of these people's lives such as Helen Hunt Jackson and Mabel Loomis Todd for Dickinson as well as significant family members and/or partners/spouses. These four main subjects share something like an heredity of female poetics.

The Education of Sylvia Plath, Smith College, 1951-1952

This is the second post in a series on the Education of Sylvia Plath and it reviews the courses she took during the 1951-1952 academic year. In Sylvia Plath's second year at Smith College, she roomed with Marcia Brown (later Stern), in Room 6 of Haven House. This room was on the middle floor of the house (2nd floor American, 1st floor elsewhere). Plath's room faced the Davis Student Center this year and the room had a bay window, a nice architectural feature. View from bay window of Room 6, toward Library View from bay window of Room 6, toward Elm Street 1950s floor plan of Haven House As with her first year, Plath carried six courses and received 15 credits (Physical Education did not earn her any credit). Using the finding aid to Plath mss II at the Lilly Library , I have added some of the papers that Sylvia Plath submitted for her courses. Her artwork I am unable to attribute at this time, an oversight for which I apologize. Plath's notebooks for Govern

Sylvia Plath Scholar Heather Clark Awarded NEH Grant

Heather Clark, author of The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (OUP, 2011) and The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast, 1962-1972 (OUP, 2006), has been awarded a $50,000 2017-18 "Public Scholar" Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Humanities . The funds will enable Clark to continue work on her forthcoming, highly-anticipated biography of Sylvia Plath entitled  Sylvia Plath: The Light of the Mind (Knopf). The award says many things but perhaps most important is the NEH's recognition of Sylvia Plath's status as an iconic American writer. Reports have appeared so far in The Washington Post and The New York Times . From The Washington Post , "Heather Clark won a public scholars grant to write a definitive critical biography of Sylvia Plath, which Knopf expects to publish in 2019." Heather Clark, CUNY Research Foundation ($50,400): "The Light of the Mind" "A biography of American poet and novelist Sylvia Pl

The Education of Sylvia Plath, Smith College, 1950-1951

Sylvia Plath's education was impressive. She attended grade schools in Winthrop and Wellesley, Massachusetts before matriculating with the class of 1954 at Smith College in Northampton. I have always wanted a single easy way to see which courses Plath was taking and when so as such I have made a series of blog posts on the subject of "The Education of Sylvia Plath". This is the first part, for her first year at Smith College, 1950-1951. Perhaps in time I can go a little further and do something like this for Plath's junior high and high school if the record is complete enough to reconstruct something meaningful. Using the Smith College course catalogs both in person and via the Archive.org , I have transcribed the courses from these sources that Plath herself would have read. They give an overview of the subject, but to read her notes and syllabi and papers would require traveling to the Lilly Library, Indiana University at Bloomington which holds the greatest num