Sylvia Plath in the Wellesleyan Yearbook

Carl Rollyson (website; Twitter), author of American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath, graciously gave me original copies of The Wellesleyan for 1949 and 1950. The Wellesleyan was the yearbook of Gamaliel Bradford High School, from where Sylvia Plath graduated in June 1950. Included with the yearbooks was a small cache of articles about Sylvia Plath publications spanning nearly half a century:

Heller, Zoë. "Ariel's Appetite." The New Republic 223. December 18, 2000: 30-33.

Howard, Maureen, "The Girl Who Tried to be Good." The New York Times Book Review. December 14, 1975: 1-2.

Jefferson, Margo. "Who Was Sylvia?" Newsweek. December 22, 1975: 83.

"The Blood Jet is Poetry." Time 87. June 10, 1966: 118-120.

While the articles are fascinating, the yearbooks are the focus of this blog post. I have gone through them carefully and have scanned all of Plath's appearances that I found, plus one instance where Plath might be in a photograph but it is a general photo: not of a classroom or an extracurricular group shot. In the 1950 yearbook, Plath has an artwork reproduced. I have not included that in this post as it is under her copyright still. However, it was reproduced under the title "Kids fixing car" on page 24 in Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual (Google Book). In the 1950 yearbook, this drawing appeared on page 78.

Normally I do not post images on this blog for which I have not obtained permission or where copyright is a concern. Granted that these school photographs belong to someone, I have not been able to track them down and operate under the premise that this usage is educational, not for profit, and fair use.

1948-1949 yearbook

1949-1950 yearbook

All links accessed 1 December 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...

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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