Plath Profiles 5: Another Preview

Gail Crowther and I have written a fourth conversation of archival our adventures. In "These Ghostly Archives 4: Looking for New England" we pick up where "These Ghostly Archives 3" left off, with Gail sailing to America for her first visit to Sylvia Plath's home country, conquering New York City and much of Massachusetts from the Cape to the Pioneer Valley. In "TGA4" we challenge the traditional notion of the archive as a bricks and mortal repository for documents, and we assert the archive lives in a community like Northampton and the Smith College campus, in which Plath's presence can be felt just as much as on a manuscript of her poetry. From our paper, "We would also like to introduce to you the notion that the boundaries which contain the contents of an archive can at times become a little blurry. In fact, sometimes, especially when dealing with Plath and Smith College, it can feel like the archive is everywhere – not just simply papers and the place that contains them, but literally a living archive reflecting history on the ground. In this case, we could even say that the archive is 'a dynamic space,' both preserving itself and working with contemporary changes taking place around it" (12)

In "These Ghostly Archives 4: Looking for New England," we discuss the Sylvia Plath Collection, but as well we talk about Sylvia Plath's correspondence and relationship with The New Yorker magazine, held at the New York Public Library, additional Plath manuscripts and other archival materials in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, also at the NYPL, and a letter of Plath's held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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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