Skip to main content

Sylvia Plath Collections: Letters to Melvin Woody


At almost the eleventh hour in working on Volume 1 of The Letters of Sylvia Plath (above) I received PDF's of the letters Plath wrote to Melvin Woody. There was a mad scramble to get the letters transcribed, proofed, annotated, and integrated into the volume before we reached the point of no returns (a.k.a. Indexing). But, they made it. And in my correspondence with Mr. Woody, he let it be known that he planned to give his original letters to Smith College. I got him in touch with Karen Kukil, and later in the year, Karen visited Mr. Woody in New Haven to officially acquire the originals for the collection at Smith College. They join other caches of letters Plath wrote to friends she made during her Smith College years (Ann Davidow-Goodman, Marcia Brown Stern, Elinor Friedman Klein, and Philip McCurdy).

This blog post is simply done to announce that the letters are now formally a part of the Sylvia Plath Collection at Smith and open to researchers. They are physically stored in box 16.1, folder 19.1.

There are 8 letters which date from 1951 to 1955:

22 June 1951, written from Swampscott, Mass.
24 March 1954, written either from Smith College or Wellesley, Mass.
5 May 1954, written from Smith College, Northampton, Mass.
7 May 1954, written from Smith College, Northampton, Mass.
circa 20 May 1954, written from Smith College, Northampton, Mass.
5 July 1954, written from Wellesley, Mass.
17 December 1954, written either from Smith College or Wellesley, Mass.
26 January 1955, written from Smith College, Northampton, Mass.

The June 1951 letter was something of a revelation to me as if I had known that he was in the Plath picture at that time I had forgotten it. In my emails with Mr. Woody he let me know that he hitchhiked up to Massachusetts that summer and that he was the inspiration for "Cal" in The Bell Jar; that that scene was inspired by that visit he made to Plath and Marcia Brown Stern in Swampscott.

Mr. Woody and Plath appear to have met for the first time slightly earlier than that summer during Plath's spring break from Smith College when Plath went with Marcia to her home in New Jersey (also visiting New York City). He appears on her calendar on 31 March 1951 as part of a double-date: Mel and Marty, Ted and Me. Not sure who Ted is. It's obviously not that Ted.

Naturally the letters are published, but the originals provide information missing from their printed siblings. At least I think seeing Plath's original handwriting and typewriting offers information, or rather, intimacy, that is unfortunately lacking in a printed book. The December 1954 letter, for example, is in a Christmas card designed by Rosalind Welcher, an artist whom Plath certainly appears to have liked as a number of letters were sent in Welcher's cards. Here is a copy of the card (edited to obscure Plath's handwriting).



I am very grateful that Mr. Woody answered my email query about the letters and believe that they add quite significantly both to The Letters of Sylvia Plath and the Sylvia Plath collection at Smith.

Popular posts from this blog

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