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...

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...

Amy C. Rea Reviews Heather Clark's Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

Here’s a thing about me: I’m a voracious reader, but very rarely have a physically based emotional response to something I’m reading. I don’t laugh out loud, I don’t cry, both of which I do when watching movies. It’s not that I don’t find things funny or sad when I read, but apparently I need more of a visual cue. So it’s telling that when I got to the end of Dr. Heather Clark’s new biography of Sylvia Plath, Red Comet , I cried. It’s not as if I didn’t know how the story ended. But the level of detail and analysis Clark brings to her study of Plath is so detailed, and her examination of those brutal last weeks so deeply explored, that it broke my heart. Clark has done some tremendously important and much-needed work with this biography. It would be remiss of me not to note the aid she received from Peter K. Steinberg and the work he did compiling Plath’s Letters . Clark clearly spent a great deal of time studying these source materials, as well as others that were not available ...

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