Links, etc. - Week ending 24 January 2009

From Sweden comes Lady Lazarus. This is a website designed and created by Sonja and Florian Flur. Theirs is quite a unique relationship and situation; one that upon reading their webpages will lead many to have questions. The website looks at two living people who identify with Sylvia Plath and Otto Plath. They explore "the possibility of reincarnation and how a person possibly goes from one life to another." The Flur's have several separate webpages and two movies that detail the stories of their lives and some of the interesting connections with the lives of Sylvia Plath, Otto Plath, and Ted Hughes. Having read the pages now a couple of times, I'm still trying to process their story and the possibility of reincarnation. The Flur's are kind enough to include a link for leaving comments, should you have any. The site is beautiful designed, the movies wonderfully shot and edited, and easy to navigate.

From Italy comes "Raccontando Sylvia " ("About Sylvia") by Lorenzo De Feo. On 26 January, at Bibli Library, Rome, there will be a preview of the play "Raccontando Sylvia" ("About Sylvia"). The play - a monologue written and interpreted by Rita Pasqualoni and directed by Lorenzo De Feo - talks about some of the most important moments of Sylvia' life as a woman in a very intimate way. From De Feo, "We enter the Plath's world in the most soft way to highlights her emotions and sufferings without being never disrespectful or vulgar." This is neither a reading nor a presentation of research on Plath the poet-artist but, above all, on Plath the woman, with all her resolution and weaknesses but also her feeling of inadequacy about the society in which she lived. This is still a real situation in which many women can find themselves.The play, after this preview, will be performed at Teatro dei Contrari (Via Ostilia 22, Rome, near Colosseum) - an intimate theatrical place thanks to its warm welcome - in February (8th, 9th, 15th, 16th and 22th).

All these international goings-on! Three Women continues its run at the Jermyn Street Theatre in London through 7 February.

Something for everyone: This spring, HarperPerennial will publish Stonepicker and The Book of Mirrors by Freida Hughes. Stonepicker was originally published in 2001; look for a single volume of The Book of Mirrors this fall.

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...

Some final photographs of Sylvia Plath

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...

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...

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