Searching for Sylvia Plath & the Google News Archive

A few of you may have read my paper "'They Had to Call and Call': The Search for Sylvia Plath" in Plath Profiles 3. For this article, I used microfilm and internet resources to create a bibliography of articles on Plath's first suicide attempt on August 24, 1953 that vastly increases the known publications which ran the news story and builds upon those articles presented in previous bibliographies. Microfilm is presently the best resource we have for searching through older newspapers; and whilst it is not the sexiest technology out there it certainly does serve a good purpose.

However, some genius decided to scan obscure & not-so-obscure newspapers from microfilm, run OCR, and make them searchable via Google News Archive. There are other tools for this kind of thing, such as ProQuest Historical Newspapers and others. However, since Google News Archive is largely free and doesn't require a subscription, this is one of my favorite tools and will greatly enhance the availability of older materials out there on Sylvia Plath (and probably other subjects but who cares about those!). This of course will benefit current and future research projects.

To save you some time and perhaps trouble, I'll post a few useful or interesting Sylvia Plath related links:

Sylvia Plath (in general); August 1953; Bell Jar lawsuit (1987 January & February); Gravestone controversey (1989, April & May).

And of course there is much more including book reviews and like today, many articles just name drop. Not all of the articles are free, but you are typically given enough information to then go and visit a library or request the article via interlibrary loan to save some money in your purse or wallet. This is an amazing research tool and I hope you enjoy using it as much as I have!

You can see a bibliography of articles on Plath's first suicide attempt, and read PDF's of them, over at A celebration, this is.

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...

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de...

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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