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7

Sylvia Plath Info Blog turned 7 just a few days ago on April 27, 2014! It is hard for me to fathom, still, that it has carried on this long. I sincerely hope the content is interesting, useful and relevant. Sincere thanks to all who visit, comment, and take something away (and not just in the literal sense of those of you who save every post to your computer hard drive!).

Since this blog began, there have been nearly 400,000 page views from people spanning 179 countries and territories. It shows how far reaching interest in Sylvia Plath is and it is an honor to try to contribute to that. I am not sure if anyone on the International Space Station has hit the blog or not. Since that first post in 2007, which I still cringe at -- being quite nervous about what the blog would be like, I and several guest posters have contributed nearly 1,000 individual blog posts!

For those who are interested, here are some metrics:

The top five pages viewed since this blogs conception are:

"Frieda Hughes on the breakup of her parents marriage"

"Letter from Julia Stiles regarding The Bell Jar"

"Additional News Articles on Sylvia Plath's First Suicide Attempt"

"Sylvia Plath's Voice"

"The Magic Mirror by Sylvia Plath"

There is a natural bias there in that they have been around longer versus some of the more recent posts.

The top keyword searches are:

"plath info blog"

"sylvia plath blog"

"sylvia plath info"

"Q: On a scale of 1 to 10 how studly is Peter K Steinberg?
A: 12"

"sylvia plath blogspot"

"plath blog"

Hardly surprising.

As a result of this blog, and my website for Sylvia Plath A Celebration, This Is, I have met some truly remarkable people, as well as some pretty skeevy stalkers. But, hey, I guess "it is what it is"... I hope to keep the blog going for a while longer at least. Posts this year have been a bit slower than in the past as I continue to work on transcribing, proofing, and annotating Sylvia Plath's letters. In working on this project I have learned so much about Plath, gained new respect for her work as a writer and her life. It has been an absolute honor. Similarly, it has been a special privilege to write this blog and all these posts for you, its readers. My most sincere and humble thanks to you all for your interest in this blog. Plath on!
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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...
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Some final photographs of Sylvia Plath

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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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