Since 1994 Sylvia Plath has been a massive part of my life. For Christmas that year I received a copy of The Bell Jar, The Collected Poems , and Paul Alexander's Rough Magic . Within a year I had, at a minimum, Letters Home , the yellow paperback copy of The Journals, Susan Van Dyne's Revising Life , and Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame .       Like the speaker of Plath's poem "The Colossus", if you allow me to slightly fudge my numbers, for Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser. In November 2021, when Gary Leising tweeted that he was gaining momentum to have a course on Sylvia Plath added to the permanent curriculum at Utica University where he is, among other things, Distinguished Professor of English, I started to look at my accumulation of books by and about Sylvia Plath differently. That is, I started to think about placing my collection somewhere where they may be made both more use of and better use of th

Earlier this spring at the Lilly Library I spent some time with Sylvia Plath's short story "The Fifteen Dollar Eagle" which is held in the Plath mss collection. This is the collection of papers Plath herself selected for selling to the bookseller Ifan Kyrle Fletcher who was buying manuscripts for the Lilly.  I do not know much about religion. Any of them. But I was struck curious by the following description early on in the story: And then I forgot about it until recently reading Helena by Evelyn Waugh, which in part is set in Jerusalem and in the environs specifically of Mount Cavalry. Plath's description is so real , in a sense, I got to wondering if this was actually something she saw in a Scollay Square tattoo shop, of which there were many. In conducting some Google searches last Friday evening, I found an image from 1897 of a man called Frank de Burgh, whose entire back is covered in tattoos and the image depicted rings pretty close to true to Plath's descr

There were some letters referred to in this morning's blog post that I thought it might be nice to write a bit more about.  Sylvia Plath wrote two letters to Kenneth Allott which are housed by the Syndey Jones Library at the University of Liverpool. When in the midst of working on the paper that I gave for the Sylvia Plath Society's conference in March ( YouTube ), I found myself going down a bit of a rabbit hole which led to their being located. Naturally I wish they could have been included in volume II of the Letters of Sylvia Plath .  The letters date from 1 and 6 January 1961. In the first letter, written almost immediately upon return from the terrible visit to Yorkshire, Plath gives permission for Allott to reprint "Frog Autumn" and "Metaphors" in his anthology, Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse 1918–60 , 2nd edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962, pp. 388–90), and provides some biographical details about herself. The second letter written just

The following is the text from a paper I presented on 12 March 2022 for the Sylvia Plath Society's "Sylvia Plath Across the Century" conference. I am grateful to Dr Dorka Tamás, Kitty Shaw, and Julie Irigaray for organizing and hosting this important conference. A recording of this talk is available on the Sylvia Plath Info YouTube page . Sylvia Plath was a part of three Kathryn Irene Glascock Poetry Prize competitions. In April 1955, she was a participant. The archive at Mount Holyoke holds the two photographs of Plath with Marianne Moore and her fellow contestants on the left. The other images come from Plath’s scrapbook held by the Lilly Library. Another instance whereby piecing together aspects of Plath’s life and work spans the physical boundaries or building and states. Additionally, Mt Holyoke has typescripts of the poems she read including "April Aubade", "Danse Macabre", "Epitaph in Three Parts", "Lament", "Love is a P

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

This Autumn, Faber and Faber are issuing an edition of The Bell Jar illustrated by Beya Rebaï.  In their Autumn 2022 catalog, a draft of the cover was featured:  To be published on 6 October 2022, the book's ISBN is 9780571373079. The hardback price is £14.99. It will be 256pp. Available for pre-order on Amazon.co.uk . All links accessed 25 June 2022.