General Sylvia Plath Info Blog Update

Well, things have been kind of crazy for the last six weeks or so. With the publication of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1: 1940-1956 in the UK and the US, and then participating in one event, following other events, looking for reviews, etc. it is not hard to imagine why! But I wanted to give a general update at this point in time on a few things.

First up, those reviews: I have started to list review of the Letters on my website for Sylvia Plath, A celebration, this is. in the "Reviews of works by Sylvia Plath" page. This will be updated as I learn of reviews. The good people at Faber and HarperCollins have sent several to me which is wonderful. If you know of any not list please do let me know about it. I do not read them all but it will be helpful I think to have them tracked.

In August and September I did three posts on "The Education of Sylvia Plath", looking at her courses and writings for each academic year: 1950-1951, 1951-1952, and 1952-1953. I do have two more posts planned so fear not! Those will appear before too long.

One thing I have not blogged about since 10 April of this year is the Belfast Conference: Sylvia Plath: Letters, Words, Fragments. The programme was recently made available and it looks positively, mind-bogglingly awesome. This is the fourth major international Plath conference following ones held at Indiana University in 2002 and 2012, and one held in Oxford in 2007. Just a few of us will have been to all four of them and what I find most awesome is how each conference produces a new crop of people with unique tastes, interests, and perspectives. Maeve O'Brien deserves major congratulations for organizing the conference. I am leaving tonight for the conference and hope to blog about Belfast and the presentations. If you are attending and want to write up your observations and feeling about anything in a guest post, please do reach out to me there or via email!

After The Letters of Sylvia Plath were published I decided to treat myself to a purchase or two. I did not know what I was going to buy, but them stumbled on a publication that I did not previously know about.

In their Spring 1978 issue, Antaeus published two poems by Plath: "Stings (2)" and "Words heard, by accident, over the phone". The poems appear on pages 41 and 42 respectively. These are missing from Stephen Tabor's otherwise excellent Annotated Bibliography and were the first periodical publications for each (both did appear in the limited edition Pursuit, published in 1973). The cover and poems are both now on my website.

The other purchase I made was the November 1965 issue of Mademoiselle which printed Plath's poem "November Graveyard." A mostly random publication of this poem, for sure.

Since I drafted this blog I got another special treat and will blog about that later on in the month.

With the end of the year fast approaching it is time to start trying to make sense of Sylvia Plath in 2017. This year has seemed a convoluted whirlwind of activity for me. What about for you? I will try to summarize the year as I have done in the past with a Year in Review piece.

Additionally, I look forward to some updates to my website that I hope you will like in early 2018. Speaking of 2018: did you know that my website will be 20 years old in 2018? Twenty!

All links accessed 28 October 2017.

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...

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