Sylvia Plath: Drawings Published Today

Published today by Faber & Faber in England is Sylvia Plath: Drawings, edited and introduced by Frieda Hughes.

The book is 72 pages and is on sale via Faber's website (and Amazon.co.uk) for £16.99. The ISBN for the book is 978-0-571-29521-0.

The book features an introduction by Frieda Hughes and also publishes for the first time ever (well, the second time ever since it first appeared in The Times Magazine on 24 August 2013) a letter from Sylvia Plath to her husband Ted Hughes written in early October 1956. The book reprints two letters from Plath to her mother, as well, from 25 August 1956 and 21 October 1956 and a journal entry from 21 August 1957. These all serve as contextual devices for the drawings.

The book is divided into several sections (as seen from the proof, there might have been changes between then and now): Drawings from England; Drawings from France; Drawings from Spain; and Drawings from the USA; as well as including a short biography (chronology) and bibliography. The drawings in the book are largely drawn from the Mayor Gallery exhibit "Sylvia Plath: Her Drawings" but there are a few additional drawings reproduced from archival collections. For those who missed out on buying the Mayor's exhibit catalog (my review) or seeing the exhibit in person, this is your chance to see what it was all about!

Sylvia Plath: Drawings will be published in the United States on 5 November (the anniversary of Otto Plath's death) by HarperCollins. It will be in hardback and on Kindle via Amazon.

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