The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1, Published Today

The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1: 1940-1956 is officially published today by HarperCollins in the United States. For those who were patient enough to wait to couple of weeks after the Faber publication: you inspire me.

The 838 letters in Volume 1 begin on 19 February 1940 and end on 23 October 1956. The cut off date was intentional as that is the last letter Plath wrote before her 24th birthday. Thus Volume 2, you can deduce, begins with the first letter Plath wrote after turning 24. The book was edited by me (that's Peter K. Steinberg in case you forgot) and Karen V. Kukil.

The contents are the same between the Faber edition and that of the HarperCollins edition but there are some differences in the book design. Of course, the covers are different: both stunning and remarkable in their own ways. The Faber edition has two sections of plates, Harper just one. Same pictures and drawings though so no worries. The Faber spine is curved; the Harper spine is squared/straight. Faber has a sewn in red linen bookmark. The Faber edition is slightly taller and slimmer; the Harper edition is thus shorter but a little thicker.

A number of readers of this blog and followers on Twitter have sent me messages and the like that the book is on the way. I find this level of excitement and enthusiasm for The Letters of Sylvia Plath so wonderful. So, thank you all for being patient as we built the book. There is more to come.

Buy it from HarperCollins, Amazon, on Kindle, Book Depository, or in stores.

All links accessed 13 October 2017.

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

The passing of Sylvia Plath's family and friends

The recent news that Sylvia Plath's brother, Warren Joseph Plath, passed away was sad news to receive. I am grateful to JulieMcC for alerting me via Twitter. One of the things I am trying to keep track of is when family and friends of Plath's pass away so that we can update their life dates in footnotes to The Letters of Sylvia Plath . You would not be incorrect to believe that one should spend their time in better ways, but keeping up-to-date on this is, I feel, important. So after I learned of Warren Plath's passing, I went through both volumes of the Letters and searched for obituaries and death notices for anyone with an open-ended life span. Some of the people even passed away before 2017 when Volume 1 came out, but I either missed them or did not search deep enough or, in fact, the information may not have been as readily accessible as it is now. So here is a list of those who have passed away along with links to pages about their lives. May they all rest in pe

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

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