Update from the Archive Day 4

The archive today was fun. Karen Kukil had Plath's Royal typewriter out for someone else to photograph, so she and I started typing on it. We were comparing the way it typed against some of the documents Plath created on it, circa 1953 when she obtained it. Plath was quite proficient and efficient on the typewriter...I am not. In the process of working with it, I typed the first sentence from Plath's 19 June 1953 journal fragment, which was typed in New York City during her guest editorship at Mademoiselle. It is probable that Plath typed that fragment while at the offices of Mademoiselle, but it could be that it was typed in her hotel room (room 1511) at the Barbizon Hotel. This line I typed was "All right, so the headlines blare that the two of them..." (see Appendix 4, page 541 of The Unabridged Journals).

Click here for the url. There are some outtakes and false starts, so those might be posted online shortly...

For the rest of the morning I worked with Plath's personal papers, including her address book, her 1962 Calendar, and other items. I had looked at these before, but as ever, there were some items contained in this series of documents that took on a new significance. As a result, I was able to add a couple of books to Plath's library on LibraryThing based on evidence that she used them.

In the afternoon, for the Plath editing course, we went to meet with the reference librarian and got to work with online resources to identify people, places, etc. (there were some print options, too). And then we went to the College Archives to work with records from Smith Colleges amazing history. This included the course and student directories to identify courses Plath took and people that she may have mentioned in her letters. As I had nerded out and done the majority of my annotations previously, I spent most of my time browsing old issues of The Sophian and Smith College Associated News (SCAN)! A vast, amazing resources to identify news and names and issues going on around the campus and town during Plath's years as both an undergraduate and professor.

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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