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).

The video.

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...

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...

Amy C. Rea Reviews Heather Clark's Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

Here’s a thing about me: I’m a voracious reader, but very rarely have a physically based emotional response to something I’m reading. I don’t laugh out loud, I don’t cry, both of which I do when watching movies. It’s not that I don’t find things funny or sad when I read, but apparently I need more of a visual cue. So it’s telling that when I got to the end of Dr. Heather Clark’s new biography of Sylvia Plath, Red Comet , I cried. It’s not as if I didn’t know how the story ended. But the level of detail and analysis Clark brings to her study of Plath is so detailed, and her examination of those brutal last weeks so deeply explored, that it broke my heart. Clark has done some tremendously important and much-needed work with this biography. It would be remiss of me not to note the aid she received from Peter K. Steinberg and the work he did compiling Plath’s Letters . Clark clearly spent a great deal of time studying these source materials, as well as others that were not available ...

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