The below is a generous guest blog post by Tammy MacNeil on her recent Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: The Property of Frieda Hughes Bonhams auction victory. Congratulations on the win, but more importantly on your pregnancy. ~pks A Blue Wool Hooded Coat by Tammy MacNeil, 17 April 2018 The announcement in late January 2018 that Frieda Hughes would be selling a large lot of her famous parents' personal possessions garnered attention in the press on both sides of the Atlantic. More than one Plath devotee wondered if this would be their opportunity to own something that had once belonged to Sylvia Plath herself. I have been a follower of Plath's for about twenty years, having written my Master's thesis on her work's influence on Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters . I believed that this auction was my chance to own a small piece of Plath history. But what piece? Much as Peter K. Steinberg describes in his telling of winning Plath's fishing rod , narrowing my focus t...

Going into Bonhams fascinating Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, The Property of Frieda Hughes auction I was completely torn about bidding. Of course Plath herself, in the guise and persona of "Lady Lazarus", predicted how her readers would covet "a piece of my hair or my clothes". And having been lucky enough to acquire, previously, something that Plath created as well as being gifted a typescript story , there is always the desire to have more. I ranked some of the lots that most interested me and that would not completely destroy my meagre piggy bank from the moment I saw the draft sales catalogue in January. I was completely taken with the idea of owning something as random and frivolous as Plath's fishing rod ( Lot 351 ). But something in me said go for something else. So I marked down Lot 334 ("A Winter Ship") as being idea. Copies are available but not one that was retained for 58 years by the family. I was interested also in the small lot of boo...

In February I wrote about one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for me… when my friend Suzanne bought and gave me a typescript story called "The Dark River" by Sylvia Plath. Shortly afterwards I sent the story to a friend who is a book binder and artist. This was to have a custom box made to house the typescript and recently it was returned to me. Project complete. I asked for the cloth on the box to be a dark blue color to kind of match what a dark river might look like. I think Barbara, the woman who made the box, knocked it out of the park. The spine label is glorious. Inside the box is a custom folder to further protect and support the seven pages of the story. I've added some acid-free interleaving paper to wrap around the story and protect the folder from any potential transfer of acids from the story pages to the folder. All links accessed: 29 March 2018.

Readers of Sylvia Plath will be given a new way to interact with Plath's poetry in Plath Libs , which was inspired by Mad Libs , created in 1953 by Leonard Stern and Roger Price. The first book features five of Plath's works: "The Glutton", "Maudlin", "Metaphors", "The Hanging Man", and "Winter Trees". Let's say for example that in "The Glutton" that you did not like Plath's line-ending verb "slake"... Well, now you, the reader, can revise the poem yourself! Yee-haw ! The entire poetic output of Plath is scheduled to be Plath-Libbed in a projected 2,999 more five-poem publications over the next 27 years. The first book is available as a free PDF download for a limited time. Subsequent volumes will be sold exclusively at Wal-Mart for $17.99. The cover was inspired by the unanimous success and support of the Faber edition of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1 . All linked accessed 1 April ...