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...

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de...

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...

Search This Blog