Sylvia Plath's "Ghostly Archives" in one week!

Mortimer Rare Book Room,
© Gail Crowther, 2011*

In 7 days - one week - Gail Crowther and I will give our much anticipated (ha ha) talk on Sylvia Plath and archives in "These Ghostly Archives 5: Reanimating the Past" at Plymouth University. Can you stand it? Are you going to be there? Thank you in advance if you are! Can you not make it? No worries, read it in Plath Profiles 6 to be published this summer. In a practice run through the paper last weekend via Skype, we discovered that it was more than 75 minutes so had to cut out entire sections!

Whether or not you can make it, why not take the next few days to catch-up, familiarize, or re-familiarize yourself with the series of papers, published between 2009 and 2012.

These Ghostly Archives (2009)

These Ghostly Archives, Redux (2010)

These Ghostly Archives 3 (2011)

These Ghostly Archives 4: Looking for New England (2012)

In "These Ghostly Archives 5: Reanimating the Past" we have something for everyone... previously unknown (or possibly never before cited) letters from Plath and Ted Hughes, never before seen photographs of the couple. And to boot, in the presentation we can quote from letters found and show images of these materials that we are unable to in our published paper.

We look forward to reading this paper for you and to meeting some new people. Ted Hughes scholars are (even) welcome!

Remember, the reading will be on 20 March 2013 in the Rolle Building, Plymouth University, Room 605, at 6 pm.

*Image above may not have anything to do with talk and it used for illustrative purposes only. Though I am sure we mention Smith College's Sylvia Plath Collection & the Mortimer Rare Book Room at some point... How could we not?

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...

Search This Blog