Skip to main content

Sylvia Plath Slept Here

In August 1955, a few weeks before she left for Cambridge, England, Sylvia Plath travelled to Washington, D. C. to visit her friend Sue Weller. I was going through some of my older photographs of Plath places, and realized that this image was not on my website (part of the unofficial "Sylvia Plath Slept Here" series of photos) and not mentioned on this blog. Weller lived at 1514 26th St NW, which is about a 10 minute was from either DuPont Circle or Foggy Bottom (one of the greatest names for a public transport station ever, along with Dorking in England). It is a nice, quiet street which very nearly borders Rock Creek Parkway.


Labels:

Comments

  1. Right Mind Matters27 September, 2012 15:30

    Nice picture, Peter! I lived in DC for 10 years and thought you might like to know that "Foggy Bottom" is shorthand for the Department of State, where I worked in the 70's. To government workers that's what it refers to. The metro didn't even exist yet. But historically, it is the name given to a larger area, including GW University, for instance.

    That aside, I love hearing that I've been places where Sylvia Plath walked. Rereading Paul Alexander's book, for instance, for my chapter, I learned that she went to the Everyman theater in Hampstead, where I went regularly when I lived in London in the 90's, I also walked by Yeats's house all the time, not even knowing then that Plath had lived there; I lived in St. John's Wood and walked to Primrose Hill all the time.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous29 September, 2012 15:44

    That's what I call synchronicity :-)
    / Florian

    oh, as well as your last name !?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Right Mind Matters29 September, 2012 16:12

    Actually, I learned from Alexander's book that Otto Platt changed his name to Plath when he emigrated to the US. My husband's family is from the English Platt line. P.S. the very prolific Paul Alexander has his first novel coming out.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous29 September, 2012 16:36

    Aha… Well I just read Pauls book Rough Magic, which has a lot of info about Otto. A kind of synchronicity there too :-)
    / F

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous30 September, 2012 20:28

    FYI - I know a young NYU student who has an intership at a literary agent in the city. The agent had my friend skim a soon to be published book by one of his authors. The subject of the book - Assia Wevill. Sorry, no more detailed info than that. The liteary agent, by the way, pronounced the surname we-VELL. Do you know what the correct prounciation?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Peter K Steinberg30 September, 2012 20:52

    Hi Anonymous - Thank you for your comment. Please have your young NYC student email me, I'd love to know more about this forthcoming book.

    Per this page, the name is pronoucne 'wev-ill'.

    pks

    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'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...
22 comments
Read more