Letters Home: Corrected uncorrected proof

Following Laurie's excellent post on the uncorrected proof of Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950-1963, we decided to see if it would be possible to uncover the mystery of the white-outs she mentions. Carefully holding the book up to the light, I was able to make out two of the three whited-out sections...

Acknowledgments Proof: Page /First edition: Page ix "Of course this book could not exist without the permission given me by Ted and Olwyn Hughes, who have allowed me to publish sections from my daughter's correspondence and have given me the copyright for the selections from her letters."

Proof: Page 426/First edition: Page 483/486 "It is my belief that the last blow may well have been the immediate penetration of her pseudonym 'Victoria Lucas'. She now realized that the fused, caricaturized [sic.] figures in The Bell Jar which bore recognizable idiosyncrasies, were going to be identified. Those who had sacrificed for her, served and lover her were to be hurt and would consider themselves betrayed." These comments by Aurelia Plath are interesting, especially compared to the text that replaced them.

There is a thickly whited-out bit on page 407 of the proof. I think the comments were handwritten. Throughout the copy I looked at, I saw many other insertions: mostly ellipses, one handwritten date of a letter, etc. From what I could tell, this bound proof was photocopied from an earlier marked up galley proof.

If you're interested in owning a Letters Home uncorrected proof copy, click here: there are two for sale. I do not know how common are "corrected" uncorrected proofs. In the copies I've seen in libraries, book stores, and at book fairs, they are mostly clean and truly uncorrected - appearing almost exactly as the first edition which it precedes. Indiana Univeristy at Bloomington holds the manuscript for Letters Home as well as most (maybe all?) of the original letters from Plath to her family.

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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