Paperback editions of The Letters of Sylvia Plath Published Today

Today, Faber issues in the United Kingdom the first paperback edition of both volumes of The Letters of Sylvia Plath. They each carry forward the original cover photographs but do not judge these books by their covers. We had the opportunity to make corrections and updates to some of the text and to footnotes based both on reader inquires as well as our own review of the hardbacks. Naturally we apologize that transcription errors that were not caught. Additionally, we have added an Appendix to each book with new letters. Here is a breakdown of them.

Volume I: 7 Letters
To June Johnson Helle, circa 21 March 1943
To June Johnson Helle, 14 June 1950
To Katherine Benion, 3 March 1951
To Perry Norton, 11 October 1952
To Perry Norton, 5 December 1952
To Shirley Baldwin Waring and Perry Norton, 8 June 1953
To Rosamund Pugh Swaim, circa 11 January 1956

Volume II: 2 Letters
To Smith Vocational Office, circa 26 August 1957
To Smith Vocational Office, circa 8 September 1958

Particularly in Volume I's Appendix, we see a small chorus of new recipients of letters.

At my begging, Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick went to the Lilly Library to look through the Wagner-Martin mss there and it was she who located the Norton/Waring letters. Thanks to Julie for that, and to David Trinidad who found the letters to Daniel and Helga Huws in that collection previously. The Benion was sold at auction. I located the rest. There was an additional letter that I had hoped could be put into Volume II, from Plath (co-written by Ted Hughes) to Elizabeth and David Sigmund from June 1962, that was part of the Harriet Rosenstein collection. However, since not all of the letter was readable from a brief appearance of it online, as well because inquiry letters to Rosenstein were ignored, the decision was made to exclude it. So perhaps it is something to look forward to reading in full in the future. Hope!

I have be contemplating posting on the blog a full list of the corrections. Would that be of interest?

A polite reminder: The Letters of Sylvia Plath will not, at the present time, be issued in paperback in the US by HarperCollins. Therefore, if you are interested in the corrected texts and the new letters, you will need to acquire the Faber paperbacks.

All links accessed 15 August and 19 September 2019.

Comments

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...

Search This Blog