Skip to main content

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.

Comments

  1. Woo-hoo, just got my copy! Might need to take off from work the rest of the week...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Good work! Now, where's volume two???

    ReplyDelete
  3. Twiddling my thumbs till it's on my doorstep tomorrow....

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thank you Eva, Amy, and Unknown! If you're quiet for a while I guess I'll know why! Unknown: I hope the book is delivered to you early! ~pks

    ReplyDelete
  5. Am enjoying this immensely and it's very helpful with my work.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thank you Julia! I'm glad to know this. I quite imagine the letters will be helpful to a lot of people's work! ~pks

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...

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...