Sylvia Plath's Readers and Paper Dolls

A few brief items to relate today.

Sylvia Plath's one-time rival, Adrienne Rich, died yesterday (28 March). Read an obituary here. Plath met Rich in April 1958 after a reading Hughes gave on the 11th at Harvard. From her Journals, Plath wrote "...I would posthaste recover but I must hear Ted read at Harvard tomorrow (& look forward to meeting the long looked-at poetess Adrienne Cecil Rich)..." (365). After Hughes' reading, Plath, Hughes, Rich, her husband and Marie and Jack Sweeney had dinner out in Boston's North End at "Felicia's just off Hanover Street" (365) Felicia's was located at 145a Richmond Street (pictured here is the building in April 2010). Plath's description of the evening continues on page 369. Makes for fascinating reading. For more on Plath's Boston, please read (or re-read) Gail Crowther's "Virtually There in Boston."

There is a new book (novel) which contains within its boards "people who are obsessed with Sylvia Plath." Read more about The Vanishers by Heidi Julavits.

Jeanette Stewart at the Star Phoenix in Canada reports that "Plath's paper dolls come to Mendel." The paper dolls are housed among many other great treasures at the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana. The Mendel Gallery is in Saskatoon (aka in the middle of nowhere), Canada. You can read more about the "Paper Doll" exhibit here.

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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