In June I received an email asking about something that was said back in 2017 during the Q & A of a talk that I gave with Heather Clark and Karen V. Kukil at the Grolier Club. If I knew it, I had forgotten, that a
video was available online of the Symposium which was done in conjunction with the exhibit from the collections of Judith Raymo.
At the start of the Q & A, Richard Larschan, who was a great friend of Aurelia Plath's in Wellesley, asked if we had gotten access to sealed letters at the Lilly Library. He had asked this of me a few times but I never really did much investigating about it.
But later, as we were in the throes of preparing Volume II of
The Letters of Sylvia Plath, I did write to the Lilly to ask if they have or had any sealed materials. I was informed that they do not presently have any sealed Plath materials. However, I learned after the good archivists did some digging, that when Aurelia Plath sold the collection to the Library in 1977 that there were in fact two sealed letters. But, fortunately for many Plath scholars, they had been unsealed a long, long time ago and thus were available for researcher use. And they were included in the volume.
The two letters
—dated 23 September 1962 and 22 November 1962
—were from Plath to her mother. Both have footnotes that acknowledge their shared history. See pages 832 and 918 of Volume II. Both letters are famous for the fact that they have heavy black pen redactions made by Aurelia Plath. I transcribed as much as I could but a few words and lines were impossible. I selected these letters to include in the plate section of Volume II so that readers could see what I was up against in transcribing and editing them.
It was fun to re-live the event at the Grolier Club. Ah, times were so much simpler then... While I answered the query of the correspondent directly to her, she had asked originally if I would do a blog post about it. So, this is that!
All links accessed 15 June 2019.
