Skip to main content

Full Moon and Assia Wevill

Biographically, 50 years ago this weekend was a significant one for Sylvia Plath. It was that weekend that David and Assia Wevill visited Court Green. According to Plath's 1962 Letts Royal Office Tablet Diary, the Wevill's arrived on Friday 18 May. She made gingerbread and beef stew. At 6:40, Plath also had a note that there was a German program on the BBC.  Saturday, 19 May, there was a full moon; and the day is clean from responsibilities save for Plath making a note about Nancy [Axworthy]. Sunday 20 May, the only note is that there was an Italian broadcast on at 3:10.

And, of course, on Monday 21 May, Plath grabbed sheets of her typescript draft of The Bell Jar, turned the pages over, and wrote "The Rabbit Catcher" (originally titled "Snares") and "Event" (originally titled "Quarrel") because something went seriously wrong.
Labels:

Comments

  1. The Plath Diaries19 May, 2012 08:33

    Fascinating, Peter! Thanks for letting us know!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Melanie Smith19 May, 2012 08:41

    Thank you Peter. They are both wonderful, strong poems, and they definitely reflect that something shifted that weekend. Oh the fraught unravelling of it all.

    I should teach Event next year.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Julia Gordon-Bramer20 May, 2012 14:38

    I love that Julio brought the tarot into this. :-) Yes, yes, yes. I believe that there are no coincidences.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
2 comments
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
4 comments
Read more