The Letters of Sylvia Plath

As you know, I have been co-editing Sylvia Plath's letters with Karen V. Kukil of Smith College. It gives me great pleasure to let you know that recently we submitted the manuscript for The Letters of Sylvia Plath to Faber & Faber in London.

This has been an incredible journey. I have learned so much about Sylvia Plath (and Ted Hughes). About their lives and publications, as well as events in Massachusetts, England, and other places. About culture and history. And so much more.

I will give any updates I can on this blog, so for now please no questions regarding publication though I am sure you have many. Thank you all for your patience and support during this project. My efforts were greatly enhanced by my best friends sugar and caffeine. The number of people that contributed to this project and their enthusiasm, support, and information has been extraordinary. Several people went above and beyond the call. You know who you are.

It was a privilege of the highest order to be entrusted by Frieda Hughes with the task of locating, reading, transcribing, and annotating all the known, extant letters written by Sylvia Plath. Every letter found, read, transcribed, and annotated has had you, the reader of Sylvia Plath, in mind. I cannot wait for you to read what this book. I hope this will be a building block for and a significant contribution to Plath scholarship.

Here are some pictures:

Editing the Index, mind the glare off my de Chirico-esque darning-egg head

Folders for each year

Photocopies of letters to people Not Named Aurelia Plath

Photocopies of letters to Aurelia Plath

The letters in open boxes

The boxes are closed

The letters all printed out,
next to a 1954 Royal HH typewriter, just like Plath's

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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