Sylvia Plath Collections: Philip Hobsbaum papers

Gail Crowther and I recently teamed up for a These Ghostly Archives-inspired archival research trip and thought we would share it with you.

PKS: The University of Glasgow has some Sylvia Plath archival material. In October 2018, a blog post entitled Philip Hobsbaum (1932-2005): Ghosts in the archive – Sylvia Plath was published about the Philip Hobsbaum papers that are in the process of being catalogued.

GC: Philip Hobsbaum (1932 - 2005) was a teacher, poet, and critic, and a contemporary of Ted Hughes’ at Cambridge where they were both interested in the oral power of poetry. It was here that Hobsbaum worked as the editor of delta, a small poetry magazine published by the University of Cambridge throughout the 1950s and 60s. After moving to London in 1955, Hobsbaum was instrumental in setting up The Group which was a regular meeting for poets and writers to share ideas and work. In the 1950s and 60s much of literary London would attend The Group, including Ted Hughes, David Wevill, Assia Wevill, and Peter Redgrove. When PKS contacted me with the news that there were some Plath related papers in Hobsbaum’s archive in Glasgow, we felt it was worth exploring to see what was contained there.

PKS: The extent of the collection is three boxes, but it seems filled with plenty of Plath-related materials. The most interesting for us are the Plath typescripts of four poems: "Vanity Fair", "Black Rook in Rainy Weather", "The Snowman on the Moor", and "The Lady and the Earthenware Head". The poems were written between 28 October 1956 February 1957. The first poem has Plath's Whitstead address typed at the top right and the other three her Eltisley Avenue address. delta published Ted Hughes in 1955, and "Winter Words" by Plath in their Summer 1956 issue.

GC: Organising a trip to the University of Glasgow Library was fairly easy, mainly because the librarians and archivists were so friendly, helpful, and efficient. I arrived at the archive under a blackening Glasgow sky and took a lift to the twelfth floor. Entering the Reading Room I was immediately struck by the view from the floor to ceiling windows which looked out across the city and the campus. After a brief introductory talk about archive rules and data protection, I was settled at a desk and given three brown boxes to examine one at a time. Inside each box were several white thinner cardboard folders, each thematically organised, such as press cuttings, typescripts, letters etc. It became clear almost immediately that Hobsbaum had been impressed with Plath’s work during her lifetime and continued to take a serious interest after the publication of Ariel. He followed the subsequent biography controversies over the years, and Ted Hughes’ dealings with the press. He was also an enthusiastic teacher of Plath’s work and enjoyed discussing Plath with his students in Glasgow who he said every year ‘insisted’ he covered Plath in lectures and seminars. He had students who lived as far away as India coming to study Plath at Glasgow.

PKS: Hobsbaum appears to have been genuinely fond of Plath's work. While they are copies, the precious typescripts have been added to the Sylvia Plath Archival Documents Hub and it is worth noting that it was the first instance of a typescript of "Vanity Fair".* It is always interesting to me to see just what Plath's friends and acquaintances collected in the years and decades after her death. What we do not know is whether Plath posted these poems to Hobsbaum for considering in delta or if she perhaps met with Hobsbaum in Cambridge or in London. But given the addresses and dates of composition we can deduce that they were given to Hobsbaum in late winter or early Spring of 1957. Plath was in London just a couple of times that spring, most memorable for me in April when they were in the capital to accomplish business related to Ted Hughes traveling to the US in June (medical exams and Visa).

GC: One of the most interesting documents in the archive was a letter Hobsbaum wrote to Trevor Thomas thanking him for a copy of his memoir Last Encounters. Although this correspondence is one-sided, Hobsbaum shares his memories of meeting Plath and his love of teaching her work. He recalls knowing Ted Hughes at Cambridge who he describes as very rough-looking with a bad case of dandruff and greasy hair (though a fine poet ‘at that time’). He also remembers meeting Assia Wevill for the first time who he describes as the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He ends his letter by describing Plath as a ‘legend’.

PKS: To read an acquaintance of Plath's refer to her with genuinely affection is a good thing; especially considering that some from the Cambridge period did not take to Plath (the person) very well. The Plath-related papers in Hobsbaum collection is small; however, the collection on the whole is massive and is undoubtedly is a valuable resource.

All links accessed 20 June and 4 September 2019.
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*I suspect a copy of the typescript is held by Smith College in the working papers for Plath's Collected Poems.

P.S. Interested in These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath? Please buy a copy!

Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (Faber Liberty Edition) & Ariel (Faber 90th Anniversary Edition)

Faber & Faber in London is set to publish today a "Liberty edition" of Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar. Priced at £14.99.

I was recently told that the cover incorporates period fabric chosen from the Liberty Fabric archives. Fantastic!

Who can forget Plath's own reaction to Liberty's from her recently published Letters? For example she wrote to her mother a few weeks after settling in at 3 Chalcot Square: "Eye-shopped at Liberty’s the other day: oh, the teak furniture & copper, glass & steelware! So pacifying to see & feel beautiful things" (430).

Plath also purchased greeting cards from Liberty's as well as a scarf that she gave to her mother (now held by the Lilly Library). For an image of the scarf I refer you to David Trinidad's "Collecting Sylvia Plath" published on the Poetry Foundation website).

When I first saw the new cover for The Bell Jar I thought immediately of the 1971 limited edition Crystal Gazer and Other Poems, which was published by the Rainbow Press. Copies numbered 101-400 of the run were bound in quarter buckram with hand-made Japanese paper sides and issued with a slipcase.

The title is available from Faber & Faber directly, and also, as you might expect, from Amazon.co.uk.

Also issued today is Ariel: the Faber 90th Anniversary Edition. Also available from Faber's website and the other usual sellers.

All links accessed 30 May 2019.

Sylvia Plath Books: Autumn 2019

This fall a number of books by and about Sylvia Plath will be published.

First up, the books by Plath.

On 5 September, a gorgeous hardback "Liberty" edition of The Bell Jar will be issued. (Amazon.co.uk).

The same day, Faber will issue a 90th anniversary edition of Ariel (Amazon.co.uk). (This year, 2019, is the 90th anniversary of the firm.)

Two weeks later, on the 19th, both volumes of  The Letters of Sylvia Plath will be issued for the first time in paperback.

Blessedly the same covers as for the hardback.

Now. Your attention please.

HarperCollins is not releasing paperback editions of The Letters of Sylvia Plath. So if you want the new content, which will be the subject of a separate blog post on or about the 19th, then you will have to get the Faber edition. Book Depository ships internationally for free.

If you are interested in books about Sylvia Plath this fall is for you as there are two important books coming out.

Cambridge University Press published a collection of essays edited by Tracy Brain entitled Sylvia Plath in Context on 22 August 2019 (Amazon.co.uk).

The collection contains thirty-four essays in a range of "Contexts". I am happy to say that I have two pieces in it. The first, in "Literary Contexts" was developed from a talk I gave at the 2012 Plath conference at Indiana University and is called "'Sincerely yours': Plath and The New Yorker". The second is in "Biographical Contexts" and is called "Plath's scrapbooks" and was an essay I was desperate to write for more than a decade since I first handled her scrapbooks housed now at the Lilly Library. It was such an honor to finally get to do so and for it to be included in this remarkable volume. It was also a genuine privilege to have had this blog serve as a method to solicit chapter ideas a few years ago. And I appreciate Tracy's gracious words on that in the volume.

Next, on 9 October 2019, Louisiana State University Press will publish Reclaiming Assia Wevill: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Literary Imagination by Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick (Amazon.com).

Julie's book is the first critical work on Assia Wevill and is groundbreaking. The book "reconsiders cultural representations of Assia Wevill (1927–1969), according her a more significant position than a femme fatale or scapegoat for marital discord and suicide in the lives and works of two major twentieth-century poets."

The last few years have been great for Sylvia Plath books and 2019 continues this trend.

All links accessed 30 July and 31 August 2019. Revised 2 September 2019.

An Additional Article Relating to Sylvia Plath from August 1953

Yes is the answer. I am still searching for Sylvia Plath.

This year, so far, has felt slow for finding new articles on Plath's August 1953 disappearance and suicide attempt but there is one new one to report. It is "Missing Girl Found Asleep in Home" from page 1 of the Buffalo Evening News on 26 August 1953. It joins another Buffalonian article previously found from the 27th in the Buffalo Courier Express.

The article is on the First Suicide Attempt page of A celebration, this is, as well as a transcription of the text which reads much the same as all the others on this aspect of Plath's disappearance.

All links accessed 4 August 2019.

Sylvia Plath's Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom

Sylvia Plath's "Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom" might be the little engine that could of short stories. Published in January 2019 by Faber and HarperCollins, the story has already been translated and issued in French and Portuguese. A Spanish edition is forthcoming.

La Table Ronde published Mary Ventura & le neuvième royaume in May.

Biblioteca Azul published Mary Ventura e o nono reino in August.

Casa de Libro will publish Mary Ventura y el noveno reino on 17 October 2019.

All links accessed 22 August 2019.

Sylvia Plath In Context: Essays edited by Tracy Brain

Published today by the Cambridge University Press is Sylvia Plath In Context, edited by Tracy Brain (Amazon.co.uk).

From the book blurb on CUP's website:

Sylvia Plath in Context brings together an exciting combination of established and emerging thinkers from a range of disciplines. The book reveals Plath's responses to the writers she reads, her interventions in the literary techniques and forms she encounters, and the wide range of cultural, personal, artistic, political, historical and geographical influences that shaped her work. Many of these essays confront the specific challenges for reading Sylvia Plath today. Others evaluate her legacy to the writers who followed her. Reaching well beyond any simple equation in which biographical cause results in literary effect, all of them argue for a body of work that emerges from Plath's deep involvement in the world she inhabits. Situating Plath's writing within a wide frame of references that reach beyond any single notion of self, this book will be a vital resource for students, scholars, instructors and researchers of Sylvia Plath.

Below is a list of the essays in volume.

Part I. Literary Contexts:
1. Plath and the American poetry scene by Jonathan Ellis
2. The dominant trends in British poetry of the 1950s and early 1960s by Eleanor Spencer
3. Plath and the classics by Holly Ranger
4. Plath and the radio drama by Andrew Walker
5. 'Sincerely yours': Plath and The New Yorker by Peter K. Steinberg

Part II. Literary Technique and Influence:
6. Plath in the context of Stevie Smith by Noreen Masud
7. Plath's whimsy by Will May
8. Sylvia Plath and you by Tracy Brain
9. Plath and the lyric by Lucy Tunstall
10. Plath and the pastoral by Iain Twiddy

Part III. Cultural Contexts:
11. Plath and food by Gerard Woodward
12. Plath and fashion by Rebecca C. Tuite
13. Experimental bravery: Plath's poetry and auteur cinema by Lynda Bundtzen
14. Plath and television by Nicola Presley
15. Plath and art by Jane Hedley

Part IV. Sexual and Gender Contexts:
16. 'Minor scandal': queer writing contexts for The Bell Jar by Beatrice Hitchman
17. 'Woman-haters were like gods': The Bell Jar and violence against women in 1950s America by Kate Harding
18. Sylvia Plath and the culture of hygiene by Laura Perry

Part V. Political and Religious Contexts:
19. The Bell Jar, the Rosenbergs and the problem of the enemy within by Robin Peel
20. Religious contexts for Sylvia Plath's work by Gail Crowther
21. Plath and nature by Richard Kerridge
22. Plath and war by Cornelia Pearsall

Part VI. Biographical Contexts:
23. Sylvia Plath's journals by Sally Bayley
24. Plath's teaching and the shaping of her work by Amanda Golden
25. Electroshock therapy and Plath's convulsive poetics by Anita Helle
26. Plath's scrapbooks by Peter K. Steinberg
27. Beyond letters home: Plath's unabridged correspondence by Karen V. Kukil

Part VII. Plath and Place:
28. 'A certain minor light': Sylvia Plath in Brontë country by Sarah Corbett
29. Plath in London by Elaine Feinstein
30. Plath in Devon: growing words out of isolation by Maeve O'Brien

Part VIII. The Creative Afterlife:
31. An alternative afterlife: Plath's experimental poetics by Gareth Farmer
32. British and American editions of Ariel and The Bell Jar by Elena Rebollo-Cortés
33. After Plath: the legacy of influence by Fiona Sampson
34. P(l)athography: Sylvia Plath and her biographers by Heather Clark

The book is expensive, coming in at £85.00. The ISBN is 978-1108470131. It will be available in the US on 30 September 2019 for $110 (Amazon.com).

All links accessed 14 and 22 August 2019.

Update on The Selected Writings of Assia Wevill

Recently I received a comment on The Selected Writings of Assia Wevill book announcement post  asking for an update on the book that I am fortunate enough to be co-editing with Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, author of the forthcoming Reclaiming Assia Wevill: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Literary Imagination (LSU Press). Julie and I are happy to provide this, however briefly.

We have compiled the first draft of the manuscript which consists of four parts: Letters, Journals, Poems, and Miscellaneous texts. All sections have been annotated with contextual footnotes. In addition, we are presently working on our introduction and the selection of images and illustrations. In the coming months we'll continue read and proof the text, try to add more information to the footnotes if we can, and try to locate more documents to include. This autumn I am going to work on building an index, because I enjoy punishing myself in nerdtastic ways.

Happily, we are on schedule to have the manuscript to our publisher, the Louisiana State University Press, by our deadline of 31 December 2019.

All links accessed 12 August 2019.

P.S. Because I have not so far—and cannot fathom posting something here without typing it—Sylvia Plath.

Sylvia Plath's fireflies

Sylvia Plath's first published poem appeared on 10 August 1941, seventy-eight years ago today. It appeared on the "Good Sport" page of the Boston Herald, page 8.

The printed poem is brief: just four lines. The subject of the poem is what the young poet heard and saw in summer evenings: crickets and fireflies which "Twinkle as they pass." I am presenting KICKING myself because this should have been in Volume 1 of The Letters of Sylvia Plath. I am seriously the most rubbish editor ever. See this blog post for more information on the poem and the letter.

Earlier this summer, or was it spring?, I was visiting some family and noticed a number of fireflies, aka lightning bugs. Of course, I thought of Plath immediately and so I immediately captured a short video of them as it had been a number of years since I had seen such a preponderance of the lovely bugs. When I was growing up we used to run around in the evening collecting them in mason jars. (We made air holes so they did not die.) We would keep them for a night and let them illuminate our bedroom and then set the free the next day.

I do recommend watching several times, in dark room, to see the fireflies flick and flash.



 All links accessed 4 August 2019.

Faber reissues Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar

On 26 July 2019, Faber and Faber tweeted out a lovely photograph featuring a person holding a copy of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath seated on some grass.

'It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York . . .'
Our gorgeous new paperback of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, with cover artwork inspired by Faber's 1966 edition, is out now. pic.twitter.com/pJ77K14N9a

— Faber & Faber (@FaberBooks) July 26, 2019

And then today, they tweeted out that the novel is officially reissued.

However, I have not seen the book listed either on their website or on Amazon.co.uk, but it is a beautiful looking cover which pays homage to their original 1966 edition.

A gallery of historical Bell Jar covers can be seen over on my website.

All links accessed 30 July 2019 and 1 August 2019.

Guest Blog Post: Cornucopia, Wisconsin

The following is a guest blog post by Amy C. Rea about her recent visit to Cornucopia, Wisconsin. All text and photographs are copyright to her. Thank you, Amy! ~pks

60 years ago, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes undertook a road trip circling America with visits to Canada and Mexico tucked into the northern and southern ends of the expedition. (For a wonderfully detailed and researched overview of this trip, see David Trinidad's On the Road with Sylvia and Ted: Plath and Hughes’s 1959 Trip Across America.)

They began their trek on July 7, and a week later, found themselves in a small north-central Wisconsin town called Cornucopia. There they found a farm on the shores of Lake Superior owned by Andrew and Helen Nozel, who graciously agreed to let them camp on their property for two nights.

Recently my husband and I took a road trip from our home in Minnesota to Bayfield, a charming small town on Wisconsin's Lake Superior shore (called the South Shore, as opposed to Minnesota's North Shore), with access to the Apostle Islands and Madeline Island. While plotting the driving route, I noticed that Cornucopia was right on the way. Obviously we would have to stop.

Cornucopia

Ehlers Store, Cornucopia
(website)

Peter K. Steinberg provided me the name of the farmers, and some very helpful people at the Bayfield County Land Records Office helped me narrow down my search, getting to a legal property description that seemed to have two potential lots that were likely to be where Plath and Hughes camped: a stretch of road cornered by Spirit Point and Birch Hill roads and Lake Superior itself.

Cornucopia had to wait until the day we returned, as the first day we ran into torrential rains. But driving through the rain made me wonder if this was the same highway they took (in reverse). I knew from Trinidad that they left Brimley, MI the morning of July 14 and arrived in Cornucopia that night. A Google map search has the most direct route cutting inland before getting to Bayfield, but Trinidad’s article reports that they drove all day without leaving the lake. That seems to imply they would have gone through Bayfield, which is a charming, New England seaside-y village right on the lake. That means they traveled on what is now WI-13, the road we took. It's hard to imagine Plath not enjoying the view; Lake Superior is the largest of the Great Lakes, and at points, you can barely see land across it, leading many locals to refer to it as the "northern ocean."

It's a beautiful drive, densely forested with little pockets of farm land carved out of the trees here and there. You can drive for miles and not see another car or house; today, rural fire address signs are at the foot of every driveway, but those mostly came into being in the 1970s-80s, so they wouldn't have been there when Plath and Hughes came through. Traveling in early July, the trees were fully leafed out and densely green: aspen, sugar maple, birch, oak, hickory, and basswood, combined with a wide variety of pine trees (jack, red, and white pine; black and white spruce; balsam fir; and tamarack). The ditches on either side of the highway were full of white, purple, and yellow wildflowers. If that's what Plath saw too, her acute appreciation of the visual must have made the drive beautiful.

Spirit Road from Highway 13

The spot where they likely camped isn't hard to find. Spirit Point Road turns directly off Highway 13, and only a mile down Spirit Point is Birch Hill Road. Spirit Point is currently paved for the first half mile, then becomes a dirt road, well packed down. Birch Hill is a dirt road that tapers down to the lake and today ends in two rutted tire track lanes. Trinidad notes that Plath and Hughes camped on a "hayfield hilltop." Current survey photos don't show any open farmland here; it appears to have been allowed to revert back to forest. But the land does slope sharply up from the lake.

Birch Hill Road

Birch Hill Road, Lake Superior behind Amy

Birch Hill Road with view of Lake Superior

Clearly I was on private property and didn't wish to be the awful tourist who can't respect boundaries. The Nozel family no longer owns the property, so the likelihood of finding someone who remembered their visit seemed beyond small. Driving toward the end of Birch Hill Road, which dead-ends at the lake, I could see some older buildings, including a decrepit shed, and felt that was as far as I could go without being intrusive. Still, I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel cautiously excited at this proximity to a spot Plath was at and which, according to Hughes, was his favorite stop of the trip.

Former Nozel property off Birch Hill Road

Of course, such a trip ends up asking more questions than it answers. Bayfield is located on Lake Superior's Chequamegon Bay. The Bay contains the Apostle Islands, which are now mostly part of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, overseen by the National Park Service. But in 1959, they were still mostly private, some still having residents and remnants of logging and sandstone mining companies. Surely Plath would have been fascinated with the stories of the sea caves, especially the large ones found around Devils Island.

However, Madeline Island was already a popular day-trip tourist destination with regular summer ferry service. Did Plath and Hughes know that? Did they consider taking a jaunt across the big lake to the beautiful island, full of intriguing history, flora and fauna?

Or when leaving Bayfield and driving through Red Cliff, did they know that they were on the reservation of the Red Cliff Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa, or that Chief Buffalo was instrumental in allowing the tribe to stay there rather than be forced west, as the government of the early 1800s wanted them to do? Given their interest in history, mythology, and other cultures, it seems like this would have been a good stopping point for them.

But we don't know how much they knew about the area they were traveling through. Trinidad doesn't detail their departure from Wisconsin, which occurred on the 16th, other than to say they drove through Minnesota to camp in North Dakota. Our route took us through the twin ports of Superior, WI and Duluth, MN, courtesy of a bridge that opened in 1961 and allowed us to quickly cross the lake between the two towns. In 1959, they could have crossed via the now-historic Aerial Lift Bridge.

As I left Wisconsin, I had to wonder what it would take to get the Wisconsin Historical Society to consider putting up a plaque in Cornucopia. How many other times has Wisconsin had a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and a Poet Laureate camping in the state?

All links accessed 10-11 July 2019.