Did you know...Sylvia Plath, Valerie Pitt, and Pierre de Ronsard

One of the reviews of the first Faber edition of The Bell Jar, the first edition to appear in print with Sylvia Plath's name as author, was by Valerie Pitt, in The Sunday Telegraph, 25 September 1966. Pitt's review, titled "Isolated Case," praises the novel story as being told with "controlling definiteness" and "disciplined clarity," remarking that these are also qualities of Plath's poetry. Very true. Pitt's review ends, "It is a book to make one regret, increasingly, the early death not only of so brilliant a writer but of so uncommon a personality."

Valerie Pitt evidently was a reader of Plath's poetry at the time of the review, commenting that "Not surprisingly, the publishers have have followed the success of Sylvia Plath's 'Ariel'" by issuing her novel under her own name. It is Pitt's comment about Plath being so "uncommon a personality" that strikes me as interesting. It is possible to ascertain something of a writer's personality from the material they publish. And naturally it is possible if you actually know the person, too. For Pitt, though, which is it? The answer, did you know..., was both!

Plath & Pitt both took a course in French translation (Montaigne, Racine, Baudelaire, among others) as well as Practical Criticism in Cambridge.

For her French Translation course at Cambridge, under the tutelage of Miss Anne Judith Barrett, Plath wrote the paper "Passion as Destiny in Racine." This paper, dated 3 March 1956 is housed now in Plath mss. II at the Lilly Library, Indiana University. And we of course remember that Plath used an epigraph from Racine for her poem "Pursuit." Another French writer Plath translated during this course is Ronsard. In 1994, the Menard Press published some of Plath's translations in Theme & Version: Plath & Ronsard. Pierre de Ronsard lived from 1524-1585.

From the Inpress Books website, "This book [Theme & Version: Plath & Ronsard] presents the previously unpublished translations of Ronsard which Sylvia Plath made in 1956 or '57, during her time as a mature student at Cambridge.

"Daniel Weissbort, who knew Plath there, contributes an essay on her approach to translation. Audrey Jones's essay discusses Renaissance iconography in Ronsard and its mediation through Plath's work. The third essay is by Yves Bonnefoy, on the significance of his great precursor."

Plath studied with Miss Barrett during her first year at Cambridge, in 1955-1956. If you are interested in buying Theme & Version, copies are available via Inpress Books, Amazon, and ABEbooks. Additionally, libraries also hold this title, so check out this link to WorldCat to see if one is near you.

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...

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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