Sylvia Plath Collections: Letters to Marion Freeman

In December 2015, Ruth Geissler (nee Freeman) donated twelve letters from Sylvia Plath to her mother Marion Freeman to Smith College in honor of her daughter Susan, Smith class of 1978. In my 2015: Year in Review post, I wrote a little bit about befriending Ruth as part of the forthcoming Letters of Sylvia Plath book. There, I mention that I Karen V. Kukil and I visited Ruth in November but what was absent from the post was our purpose... Which was to collect the letters from Ruth, meeting at the time two of her daughters, Susan and Joan.

The cache of twelve letters complements the Mortimer Rare Book Room's holdings of other Plath correspondence, joining letters to the late Marcia Brown Stern, Ann Davidow-Goodman, Philip McCurdy, Elinor Friedman Klein, Hans-Joachim Neupert, and Clarissa Roche.

The dates of the twelve letters are as follows:

16 April 1946
4 November 1946
17 November 1951
1 January 1952
1 August 1952
16 January 1954
28 April 1955
circa 12 December 1956
28 March 1961
26 October 1961
31 January 1962
28 March 1962

But how did the letters get to Smith? I emailed Ruth in December 2014 to see if she had any letters for the book. She wrote back that she did and set about making scans of them for me. I could never have fathomed that the simple query would lead within the year to the letters finding their way to the Mortimer Rare Book Room. I was and am really happy to have played a contributing role to seeing these letters placed in such a respected archive. Recently, Smith College published an article about this gift, "Letters to a 'Second Mother': New Items in Smith Collection Show Another Side of Sylvia Plath '55". As Ruth says in the article, when she found the letters she knew immediately they "belong" at Smith College.

The letters are available for reading in the Mortimer Rare Book Room and add valuable perspective to Plath's relationship to the Freeman family.

A list of archival collections of Sylvia Plath materials is on my website, A celebration, this is.

Update: A subsequent piece entitled "In Letters At Smith, A Glimpse at Lesser-Known Side of Sylvia Plath" appeared on New England Public Radio about the letters on 16 May 2016. Unfortunately absent is any mention of the Letters of Sylvia Plath.

All links accessed 3 February and 18 March 2016 and 19 May 2016; post revised slightly on 19 May 2016.

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