The Smith Alumnae Quarterly recently launched a fully searchable and downloadable archive of their amazing publications ( story ). Sylvia Plath featured in a dozen or so from the time she entered Smith through into the 1970s. I have gone through the issues from 1950 through the current Winter 2016 issue and found the following instances either where Plath authored a piece or she was mentioned. I love that the availability of the online archive takes one to the present issue. Fantastic. I was going to take the rest of the year off blogging to give you a break from me, but this resource is too cool not to mention and fits in with a theme highlighted in the Year in Review 2016 of digitization. February 1951. Sylvia Plath's Letter excerpt (unattributed) to Olive Higgins Prouty Fall 1953. Sylvia Plath's "'Smith Review' Revived" Fall 1954. Sylvia Plath's "The Neilson Professor" Summer 1955. Mentioned: Scholarship to study at Cambridge Spring...

2016 saw the passing of Ted Hughes' two siblings: Olwyn Hughes in January and Gerald Hughes in August. May they both rest in peace. I would like to issue a very special thank you to R. M. for his very generous monetary gift to me this year. It was the first time anyone has sent me money via PayPal for the work I do on Sylvia Plath and meant so incredibly much. Thank you R. I always wonder which posts on this blog readers found the most interesting during the course of any year. This year, the Sylvia Plath Info Blog turned 9 which means next year will be the 10th anniversary. Seems hardly possible! But, I would love to know from you, the readers of the blog, which posts in particular you liked the best -- from 2007 to the present. Are there particular areas of focus that you miss from the early days? Or are there things you feel are being ignored outright? Are you tired of the blog? The blog archive is all available so please do click through each month and leave a comment. I...

Sylvia Plath's "A Winter's Tale" (the poem) was a New Yorker poem, appearing in their 12 December 1959 issue. While she marketed it to the magazine in mid-1959, Plath was encouraged by Howard Moss to resubmit it later in the year after revising a line. "A Winter's Tale" is a poem of place, and that place is Boston, Massachusetts. Plath and Ted Hughes had been living in Beacon Hill at 9 Willow Street since September 1958, so she got to experience the Christmas season in the city in 1958 like never before. Plath worked briefly that autumn in the psychiatric ward at the Massachusetts General Hospital, likely in the same building and ward where she was a patient five years earlier in the late summer of 1953. She and Hughes familiarized themselves with their city by foot, often going on long walks along the wharves and through Scollay Square. They also took in museums and galleries and frequented the Boston Public Library at Copley Square. The compos...

One of the other things I learned on my tour of 26 Elmwood Road in August was that I got the house that inspired the description of Dodo Conway's wrong. This new information was alluded to in a post on McLean Hospital last month. I have long known that Dodo Conway was inspired by Sylvia Plath's Wellesley neighbor Betty Aldrich. The Aldrich family -- C. Duane and Betty and their nine children -- lived at 23 Elmwood Road which is across the street at a diagonal to the Plath house. The house I thought inspired Plath's description was a little further down the road. Today, the Aldrich house, like many in Wellesley and other affluent towns, appears to have been greatly improved from the way it looked in the 1950s. Of Dodo and the Conways, Plath wrote in The Bell Jar : Dodo Conway was a Catholic who had gone to Barnard and then married an architect who had gone to Columbia and was also a Catholic. They had a big, rambling house up the street from us, set behind a morbid faç...

As the seats in the room began to fill, the nerves left me almost immediately: like morning valley fog burning off when the sun reaches a certain point in the sky. I became instantly happy. Jonathan Bengston (University Librarian ), Lara Wilson (Director of Special Collections and University Archivist), and Christine Walde (Plath scholar, Awesome-sauce and Grants and Awards Librarian) welcomed the standing and sitting room only crowd to Room 210 in the Mearns Centre for Learning at the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia. Their comments brought the assembled listeners up to speed with the context for the lecture/talk they were about to hear. 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the Special Collections at the university. The library holds some remarkable acquisitions including manuscripts and typescripts by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, as well as letters by Hughes. Indeed, some of the letters were written by Hughes with Plath in the room with him, giving present, sti...

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...