Sylvia Plath Archival Collections

Mortimer Rare Book Room
Photo by Gail Crowther

October is American Archives Month. October is also Plath's month. The month of her birth as well as for a month we remember for the wild creativity of October 1962. As such, this month will largely be devoted to highlighting Sylvia Plath archival materials that have previously not been discussed on this blog. Big archives like those held by Smith College, Indiana University, and Emory University will be referred to as they hold micro-collections of materials that include separately cataloged collections as well as collections within collections.

Everything is connected and a visit to one archive, or the discovery of a new one, has a relationship to materials held in other archives. Some of the archives I consulted in the traditional fashion: visiting the temperature controlled reading room in a university library setting. However I think the majority were visited via cyber-space and through email requests...leaving the hunt to the good archivists and often being pleased with positive results. I prefer the former, the visit & the planning & the excitement of turning over a page myself and seeing Plath's handwriting, signature or typed return address. All the papers in all the archives are pieces of a puzzle that enables a researcher to reconstruct aspects and creations of Plath's life that are now separated. The archive forms the center of the Plath universe, being the remnants of the production of her life. The posts you will read highlight brand new archival finds (to me) as well as older archives that I have known about but never posted on (some posts I drafted as many as three or four years ago). They will also refer to previously mentioned collections for which more information was learned, and to archival materials that might be familiar to some but that may have largely gone unnoticed, under-utilized, etc.

Currently I have in mind more than twelve posts, which I hope to post every Tuesday and Friday. So as to not totally inundate you all with information, this will extend beyond October and into November (every month is archive month!). When I discuss Plath's letters, paraphrasing will be used. This is not ideal, but it is the best option for now. And I should add, not surprisingly, that in the process of uncovering some of these documents they were located with Ted Hughes materials too.

The documents I discuss are largely materials that might have gone into a next "These Ghostly Archives" paper, the series of archival conversations and stories of discovery, inquiry, and revelation which I have co-written with Gail Crowther between 2009-2013 (see this page of my website to read them). But as there are no plans for now to continue on with that series, it seems better to blog about the materials that have since been located.

As I post each collection, I will be updating the list of Plath materials on the Archival Collections page of my website for Sylvia Plath, A celebration, this is.

All links accessed 25 September 2013.

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'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...

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