Update: The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2

Hello! It is with great pleasure to let you know that Sunday night, 29 April 2018, I sent in the files to Faber & Faber for The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2: 1956-1963.

[twiddling thumbs]

[still twiddling thumbs]

[now what to do?]

The HarperCollins edition,

to be published on 30 October 2018.

The files included the final, final, final, final, final, final (etc.) proof of book itself, the front matter, the image plates & captions, and the index. Having read the volume four times since last August already, I feel it a good book and certainly, obviously, picks up from where Volume 1 concludes. I am sure you have questions. However, as in the aftermath of finishing Volume 1, I am not able at the moment to discuss anything about the volume, so I do appreciate that each of you will not ask questions! The UK cover is under review; so as soon as it is finalized and I have permission I will post in here and on Twitter, etc.

Within the turning of one calendar year---the volumes are Irish twins, essentially---we have produced out two massive volumes of Plath's letters! All for you! And my head is spinning at how we did it. Of course the project started years ago and it is hard to remember a time when I was not working on the letters! The two volumes have more than 960,000 words! (The front matter and index easily bumps the word count to more than one million!) I nearly single-handedly transcribed and proofed Plath's letters (more than 1300 of them) and created the vast majority of the more than 3,600 footnotes. In addition, I selected the images, wrote all the captions, secured permissions, etc. My mantra throughout the project was a line from Plath's poem "The Rabbit Catcher": "There was only one place to get to." Well, we are just about there and to know that the second volume is 128 days (or just over 4 months) from publication, and thus into your hands, fills me with an enormous sense of happiness.

It has been the privilege of my life to work on these books for you. I did my best and gave everything that I could to try to ensure that the text you read is as close as possible to the text of Plath's original letters (look for my tell-all book later in the year to be published by Career Enders, Inc.). Early mornings, sleepless nights: day in and day out, in sickness and in health, with probably fewer than a week of days off in the course of the project. My deepest thanks for the trust placed in my by Frieda Hughes.

Look for The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2, to be published by Faber and Faber on 6 September 2018; and by HarperCollins on 30 October 2018.

All links accessed 29 April 2018.

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...

Amy C. Rea Reviews Heather Clark's Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

Here’s a thing about me: I’m a voracious reader, but very rarely have a physically based emotional response to something I’m reading. I don’t laugh out loud, I don’t cry, both of which I do when watching movies. It’s not that I don’t find things funny or sad when I read, but apparently I need more of a visual cue. So it’s telling that when I got to the end of Dr. Heather Clark’s new biography of Sylvia Plath, Red Comet , I cried. It’s not as if I didn’t know how the story ended. But the level of detail and analysis Clark brings to her study of Plath is so detailed, and her examination of those brutal last weeks so deeply explored, that it broke my heart. Clark has done some tremendously important and much-needed work with this biography. It would be remiss of me not to note the aid she received from Peter K. Steinberg and the work he did compiling Plath’s Letters . Clark clearly spent a great deal of time studying these source materials, as well as others that were not available ...

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