The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2: 1956-1963 Published Today

Today, The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume II: 1956-1963 is published by Faber and Faber in England. The book, edited by myself and Karen V. Kukil, concludes a very long journey that was years and years in the making. Before I forget---a reminder: the HarperCollins edition is scheduled for publication on Tuesday, 30 October. If you cannot wait until then, the Faber edition ships internationally via Amazon.co.uk and Book Depository, to name two sellers.

The Full Faber Cover

Volume II picks up on 28 October 1956, the day after Plath's 24th birthday, with the following exclamation: "What a lovely birthday I had!" (3). She's living still at Whitstead at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, and shortly into the volume she is moving in with her husband Ted Hughes to 55 Eltisley Avenue. The epistolary journey covers the conclusion of Plath's Fulbright; a teaching year at Smith College in Northampton; a writing year in Boston; a cross country journey and residence at Yaddo; moving back to England, the birth of two children and a miscarriage; the publication of two books and a lot of other writings; and the breakdown of her marriage and death.

There are 575 letters in Volume II to 108 correspondents. A breakdown of some of the letters:

18 letters to her parents-in-laws Edith and William Hughes (held by Frieda Hughes and previously unpublished and unknown to SP scholars); plus 8 other letters to Edith and William Hughes (also unpublished, but held in archives so possibly known);
11 letters to Olwyn Hughes; 12 letters to Gerald Hughes;
230 letters to Aurelia Schober Plath;
First publication of Plath's professional correspondence with publishers and editors, sometimes revealing authorial intention of her works:

18 letters to the BBC;
19 letters to The New Yorker;
11 letters to the Critical Quarterly, primarily re: American Poetry Now, a pamphlet of poems edited by SP (1961)
5 letters to Heinemann
And more!

14 letters to Dr. Ruth Beuscher, her psychiatrist from 1953 onwards; and
4 letters to Dido and W. S. Merwin.

There are five line drawings and many previously unpublished photographs. The images include some of the supporting documentation that was invaluable as I wrote the footnotes such as one of Plath's pocket calendars, a page of her submissions list, two pages from her Letts Diary Tablet for 1962.

The best part about having two different publishers in two different countries is there are twice as many reasons to celebrate. On 30 October 2018, when HarperCollins publishes their edition, featuring Plath's 1959 passport photo as the cover image, we can do this all over again!

All links accessed 31 July 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...

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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