This is a blog post I started several years ago (in 2013!!!) but never posted for a variety of reasons. Today seems like a good day to publish it… In the morning before a Sylvia Plath archives talk Gail Crowther and I gave at Plymouth University in England---please see the  March 2013 Blog archive  for a bit about that presentation.---Gail and I did a bit of Plathing in the villages of Belstone and Corscombe in Devon. Belstone is were Susan O'Neil-Roe lived at "Pear Trees" cottage. (For more on Belstone and "Pear Trees" please click here .) It took two trips to the village to find the house, but thanks to the marvel that is Google we were able to locate the house . From there, we went onto to nearby Corscombe, where was Plath took horse riding lessons on an older, docile horse called Ariel. Being there, the poems "Ariel" and "Sheep in Fog" take on a whole new meaning, as does her December 1962 introductions that she wrote about the poems....

Thanks go to Gregory Stall at the Grand Central branch of the New York Public Library for asking me to come and give a talk about my work on The Letters of Sylvia Plath . I did so Thursday and had a good time talking to the crowd. And it was terrific to see some familiar faces such as Eva S. and Richard L. I appreciate the rapport of the Q & A afterwards, and am grateful to Liz for lugging copies of the Letters from Staten Island. After the talk I retired to my room at the nearby Roosevelt Hotel. I chose it for its Plathian association. On 2 June 1953, her second day as Guest Editor at Mademoiselle magazine, Plath wrote in a letter home: "Yesterday a.m. we saw our first (my first) fashion show at the Roosevelt Hotel" (p631). The hotel is located at 45 E. 45th Street. Her calendar for the day calls it a "College Clinic" that started at 10:15. In a document from Plath's  Mademoiselle papers held by the Lilly Library, we can learn a little more: ...

The LSU Press publishes today Reclaiming Assia Wevill: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Literary Imagination by Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick. From the description: Reclaiming Assia Wevill: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Literary Imagination 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. Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick’s innovative study combines feminist recovery work with discussions of the power and gendered dynamics that shape literary history. She focuses on how Wevill figures into poems by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, showing that they often portrayed her in harsh, conflicted, even demeaning terms. Their representations of Wevill established condemnatory narratives that were perpetuated by subsequent critics and biographers and in works of popular culture. In Plath’s literary treatments, Goo...

On Thursday, 17 October 2019, I will be giving a talk on my editorial work on  The Letters of Sylvia Plath  at the Grand Central Branch of the New York Public Library. The library's address is: 135 East 46th Street New York, NY, 10017. The talk will start at 6 PM. It is free, however, you must RSVP . If you have time, please read an interview between me and Gregory Stall of the NYPL Grand Central location. Author photograph by Kathrine Smart, taken inside 3 Chalcot Square, London . Sorry I cropped you out of the photograph, Nick. All links accessed 7 and 14 August, and 10 September 2019.