Do You Plath in a Land Down Under?

Readers of Sylvia Plath, be on the lookout for Eavan Boland’s A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet (published April 11, 2011, by W. W. Norton & Company). In addition to "The Other Sylvia Plath," Boland writes on herself, Adrienne Rich, Charlotte Mew, Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Denise Levertov, Anne Bradstreet, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Paula Meehan.

Thanks to Melanie in Australia for bringing this to our attention. Most of the chapter on Plath can be read if you do not mind toggling between Amazon.com and Google Books.

Additionally, S. A Jones has a piece entitled "A Peanut-Cruncher’s Defence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes" in Kill Your Darlings (issue 5, pages 51-64). The article is very well written and argued. It gives a brief review of the history of why we should probably hate Ted Hughes, centering on the who owns the facts of ones (SP's) life; but it evens out I feel and gives ample evidence as to why we should probably not hate Ted Hughes. In the article, Jones is at her best when she points out:

"But what precisely did Hughes mean by 'owning the facts'? That others have no right to speculate on what is uniquely ours? Perhaps. But if that is what Hughes meant, he snookered himself by appropriating so many of the 'facts' of Plath's life, thereby inviting and possibly demanding the very contestation he decried."

I feel this was and is the crux of what could be called Hughes' Hypocrisy. While I do kind of feel his 1989 comments are almost hackneyed at this point, it is something that pops up from time to time. It is similar to, say, the insanity of including the image of the 20-year-old Guest Editor Plath smiling and holding a rose on the back of the 1971 edition of The Bell Jar by Harper & Row. If you did not want or do not want that novel to be read autobiographically, then why include a photograph of Plath which is a pictorial representation of a scene in the novel, which is excerpted just above the image? Did they have the word "Duh" in 1971? You're asking for conflation!

Anyway, I enjoyed Jones' article immensely.

Moving away from Australia for a second... keep an eye out for "The Role of Second-Person Narration in Representing Mental States in Sylvia Plath's Smith Journal" by Zsâoâofia Demjâeâen. This essay appears in Journal of Literary Semantics. 40, no 1, 2011: 1-21.

And back to Australia. Thanks to Suki for the following head’s up about a Plath reference on the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) show "Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo." The show is set between 1972- 1975, and in Monday night’s episode, lines from Plath's "Lady Lazarus" were part of the soundtrack. After they'd been spoken, someone said to Ita Buttrose (the editor and heroine played by Asher Keddie), "She was a magazine Editor too you know. Which Magazine? Mademoiselle?"

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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