Skip to main content

Sylvia Plath Books: Autumn 2019

This fall a number of books by and about Sylvia Plath will be published.

First up, the books by Plath.

On 5 September, a gorgeous hardback "Liberty" edition of The Bell Jar will be issued. (Amazon.co.uk).


The same day, Faber will issue a 90th anniversary edition of Ariel (Amazon.co.uk). (This year, 2019, is the 90th anniversary of the firm.)


Two weeks later, on the 19th, both volumes of  The Letters of Sylvia Plath will be issued for the first time in paperback.


Blessedly the same covers as for the hardback.

Now. Your attention please.

HarperCollins is not releasing paperback editions of The Letters of Sylvia Plath. So if you want the new content, which will be the subject of a separate blog post on or about the 19th, then you will have to get the Faber edition. Book Depository ships internationally for free.

If you are interested in books about Sylvia Plath this fall is for you as there are two important books coming out.

Cambridge University Press published a collection of essays edited by Tracy Brain entitled Sylvia Plath in Context on 22 August 2019 (Amazon.co.uk).


The collection contains thirty-four essays in a range of "Contexts". I am happy to say that I have two pieces in it. The first, in "Literary Contexts" was developed from a talk I gave at the 2012 Plath conference at Indiana University and is called "'Sincerely yours': Plath and The New Yorker". The second is in "Biographical Contexts" and is called "Plath's scrapbooks" and was an essay I was desperate to write for more than a decade since I first handled her scrapbooks housed now at the Lilly Library. It was such an honor to finally get to do so and for it to be included in this remarkable volume. It was also a genuine privilege to have had this blog serve as a method to solicit chapter ideas a few years ago. And I appreciate Tracy's gracious words on that in the volume.

Next, on 9 October 2019, Louisiana State University Press will publish Reclaiming Assia Wevill: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Literary Imagination by Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick (Amazon.com).


Julie's book is the first critical work on Assia Wevill and is groundbreaking. The book "reconsiders cultural representations of Assia Wevill (1927–1969), according her a more significant position than a femme fatale or scapegoat for marital discord and suicide in the lives and works of two major twentieth-century poets."

The last few years have been great for Sylvia Plath books and 2019 continues this trend.

All links accessed 30 July and 31 August 2019. Revised 2 September 2019.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
2 comments
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
4 comments
Read more