I'M A SMITH GIRL NOW!

View Haven House (Yellow House
in background) and Paradise Pond

On 29 September 1950, Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother, "I'M A SMITH GIRL NOW" (Letters Home 48). Well, I'm a Smith girl now too. Um...err...

Karen Kukil is teaching an interterm course at Smith College this week entitled "Editing Sylvia Plath's Correspondence." The course description is...

"This course will teach students how to edit correspondence. Focusing on the Sylvia Plath Collection in the Mortimer Rare Book Room, students will read and edit Plath's unpublished letters. Technical aspects related to the editing of a text will be discussed, including transcription and emendation. Plath's poetry and prose manuscripts, journals, annotated library, and other biographical material will also be considered during the course, as well as her papers in the Smith College Archives. Each student will be required to transcribe and edit one letter from the Sylvia Plath Collection. Whenever possible, footnotes will be based upon primary sources."

I will be auditing the course in the afternoons and spending time in the mornings in the archive with the Plath collection. I will try to report back each day as I did when I was at Indiana in January 2010 (see posts for 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16 January). One of the things I am working on will involve studying drafts of The Bell Jar for a paper I hope to publish in Plath Profiles 5 this summer. For the rest of the time, who knows!

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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