Review of A Memoir of Ted Hughes by Dr Nathaniel Minton (London: Westmoreland Press, 2015. ISBN: 978-0-9932660-0-3. 43 pages, £4.99. Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk ) Dr. Nathaniel Minton's memoir of Ted Hughes is brief, but provides an additional perspective to Ted Hughes and the male company he kept. Previous memoirs by Daniel Huws ( Memories of Ted Hughes, 1952-1963 , 2010) and Lucas Myers ( Crow Steered/Bergs Appeared , 2001 and An Essential Self: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, a Memoir , 2010) have also been published since Ted Hughes' passing in 1998. Another American in Cambridge, Bert Wyatt-Brown, published "Ted, Sylvia, and St. Botolph's: A Cambridge Recollection" ( The Southern Review , Spring 2004). In the Foreword written by Minton's daughter Anna, she reveals that her father's memoir was to be part of a planned book of memories to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Hughes' death in 2008. I wonder if Daniel Huws' book was also to be part

The Bell Jar , published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, received mixed reviews when it was published on 14 January 1963. Within a month after Plath's death, Ted Hughes gave Heinemann permission to publicly release Plath's name as the author. That did not stop Heinemann from releasing a book club edition of Victoria Lucas's The Bell Jar under the Contemporary Fiction imprint in 1964. Strangely, though, on the back of that dust wrapper it reads, "Victoria Lucas is a pseudonym, and we are not in a position to disclose any details of the author's identity." Do you know what's on the inside flap of the dust wrapper of the first, Heinemann edition (pictured left)? "Esther Greenwood's story began before her visit to New York, but it was during those strangely unreal weeks - when with eleven other winners of a fashion magazine contest, she was offered the riches of the city as a gift - that her growing feeling of unease an inadequacy began to op

The following is a fourth guest blog post by Annette Stevens. Previous interviews with Elizabeth Winder, Andrew Wilson, and Peter K. Steinberg appear on her Mademoiselle Women website. Hello Karen, thank you for agreeing to this interview. When did you first become interested in Sylvia Plath and why? Thank you for inviting me. I first became interested in Sylvia Plath when I took an English seminar on ‘Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath’ with Professor Dianne Hunter at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, during the spring 1974 semester. I remember that my final paper was about Sylvia Plath’s influence on the poetry of Ted Hughes, particularly Ariel ’s influence on Crow . This particular English course changed my life Please could you describe your job and duties at Smith College? For the past twenty-five years, I have curated the papers of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath in the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. My official title is Associa

The following is a guest blog post by Annette Stevens, who recently interviewed me (!) for her blog, Mademoiselle . You'll remember that two previous interviews, of Elizabeth Winder and Andrew Wilson also appeared on both her blog ( Elizabeth , Andrew ) and mine ( Elizabeth , Andrew ). Tune in next week for a fourth interview with Karen V. Kukil, editor of The Journals of Sylvia Plath (aka The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath ) and a forthcoming edition of Sylvia Plath's letters. Peter K. Steinberg is a Sylvia Plath scholar, who runs two online resources, and is currently co-writing a Plath letters collection with Karen Kukil. Here, you can read what he has to say about Sylvia Plath: Hello Peter, thank you for agreeing to this interview. Hello Annette, it’s my pleasure! Thank you for asking me to participate. What initially sparked your interest in the work of Sylvia Plath? It started as a junior in college last century . I was in an introduction to poetry course