Sylvia Plath first worked on her short story called "The Smoky Blue Piano" in the fall of 1954, possibly for her short story writing course with Alfred Kazin. By the 27th of December 1954, she was rewriting it. She submitted it to the Ladies Home Journal the following day and it was rejected in January 1955 with a personal note. She rewrote it and sent it back out, but it was rejected again in February because it famously lacked an "indefinable something" ( LV1 881). Plath, ever the diligent and persistent writer, was at work on the story again on 12 August 1955 when she sent it to Woman's Day (per her pocket diary) and experimented with hair styles.  She maintained a list of periodicals to which she sent "The Smoky Blue Piano", and this included McCall's , Collier's , The American , Cosmopolitan , Good Housekeeping , and the Woman's Home Companion . The 12 August submission, per this list, says Everywoman's , not Woman's Day . ...

Earlier this year, Cambridge University Press released the first monograph for Dorka Tamás , whom you likely know from social media, conferences and symposia, and the Sylvia Plath Society. Dorka's book, Sylvia Plath and the Supernatural , is available in hardback as well as digitally via the CUP website . The book description reads, " Sylvia Plath and the Supernatural brings a fresh and interdisciplinary perspective to the reading of Plath. Following recently published new material, this book offers a novel approach to the re-examination and celebration of supernatural themes in Plath's writings. It expands Plath studies by establishing Plath's creative and intellectual interests in early modern literature about witches and demonology, knowledge of the legacies of the Salem witch trials during McCarthyism, and her depth of understanding of the complex relationship between gender and magical powers. The book also demonstrates how Plath and her contemporaries responded...

Congratulations to Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil, as well as to Faber & Faber and Frieda Hughes, on the publication, today, in the United Kingdom, of The Poems of Sylvia Plath . The 944 page book is a hefty and healthy addition to Sylvia Plath scholarship.  Meticulously transcribed and forensically researched, readers of The Poems of Sylvia Plath  will experience the entire known poetic output of Sylvia Plath drawn from a variety of archival sources including manuscripts and typescripts, as well as from poems that appear in diaries, journals, and periodicals, among other origins.  Please do not skip the Introduction and Editorial Practices section in the front matter. You will note that, on page 3 of the book, the first poems are a trio of villanelles: "To Eva Descending the Stair", "Doomsday", and "Mad Girl's Love Song", all written in 1953. The reader is immediately presented on the following page with the page number for the relevant notes f...

In March, the Beinecke Library opened the recently processed collection of the Lois Ames Collection of Sylvia Plath. The finding aid is online here , and there is a convenient option to make a PDF which is, in some ways, easier to read. In my earlier post last year about the acquisition, as well as in this post from 2023 , I commented on a comment made by Mrs Plath about how Ames "stole both materials (manuscripts of Sylvia's) and snapshots from me." So I was fascinated to work with the papers on 23 and 24 March 2026 to see if I could make sense of Mrs Plath's claim, and, as well, see the materials that represent the start of the industry of Sylvia Plath.  What I encountered, though, was an enormous absence.  There are two boxes of correspondence, most of which feels like it is drafts of letters Ames wrote as well as some carbons of letters sent. There are incoming letters, but the majority of these are from Ted Hughes, Mrs Plath, Olwyn Hughes, and Harper & Row, ...

If you have about 50 minutes of time, and we all do, so do not think you do not, please give The Scholar’s Armchair #3 a watch.  The title of the programe is " Female Identities: Plath, Magazines, and Food " and it's a conversation between Dr. John Burton and Professor Caroline Smith on her work with Plath, food magazines, and much more.  Caroline Smith is the author of Season to Taste: Rewriting Kitchen Space in Contemporary Women’s Food Memoirs ( University Press of Mississippi, 2023 ) and  Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit ( Routledge, 2007 ). All links accessed: 16 March 2026

The last full day! I am sad but it has been a productive experience. A massive number of photographs to review, process, read, and assimiliate into the existing bank of knowledge on Sylvia Plath and the other figures that play in the story. And I want to say it is a real honor to have gotten to work with the papers the very week they opened for research and an absolute and sincere joy to relate some of the things I have seen to you. Thank you so much for reading.  I began day four working with Box 16, which I could not finish up on Thursday. Box 16 is Aurelia Schober Plath's papers, Diaries and notebooks. Fascinating documents. These consist of diaries she kept on trips to England and Europe as well as to write about her grandchildren visiting the US. It picks up from Box 15 which has earlier diaries and fragments up to the rather infamous summer of 1962 which has much shorthand at the crucial points, as well as pages that had been ripped out.  One of my favorite things in Box...

After leaving the Beinecke yesterday, I thought it might be poetic, or perhaps even prosaic, to talk a short walk up Prospect Street. Plath stayed at 238 Prospect Street and writes about it in The Bell Jar . During Esther Greenwood's visit to Buddy Willard, they "walked very slowly" in "the cold, black, three o'clock wind" from downtown New Haven "to the house where I was sleeping in the living-room on a couch that was too short because it only cost fifty cents a night instead of two dollars like most of the other places with proper beds" (1963, 63). It was dark when I got there as the library closed after sunset. This house is directly opposite Yale's chemistry facilities, and so you can imagine I wanted to go all the way, just like Buddy wanted to and visit the chemistry lab. It was, of course, famoulsy behind the Chemistry Lab where Buddy first kissed Esther Greenwood, chapped lips and all. There has been appreciable construction since I was...