Sylvia Plath Collections: More from the Rosenstein Archive

At the time the Rosenstein archive of Plath related materials first appeared for sale, an inventory was published online very briefly. The lawsuit surrounding the Beuscher letters led to the micro-site on Ken Lopez's website being taken down. However, I saved all the content which gave me the opportunity over the months to scrutinize what was listed. In fact, it lead to a last ditch effort in 2017 to obtain the letters to J. Melvin Woody and that worked out nicely as he was kind enough to supply them (they are now at Smith College).

So getting access to the archive now is really special and fulfilling. Yesterday I read four letters from Sylvia Plath to Suzette and Helder Macedo, which were identified in the inventory. Several requests to Rosenstein to share copies of the letters in the book were ignored. And not just made by me, but also requests made by Frieda Hughes, the copyright holder. Rosenstein's unwillingness to assist was frustrating and as such a tone of Plath in these letters is absent from the beautiful chorus of voices in Volume II.

The four letters are wonderful and fill in biographical and other details that even in their brevity fill in gaps and add value to our understanding of Plath's life in Devon. There is a two page typed letter from 29 September 1961; an undated Christmas card with handwritten comments from December 1961; a one page typed letter from 31 January 1962; and then a final undated, one page handwritten letter from just after Easter 1962. These letters will hopefully appear in print in the future. I'm anticipating that this archive will yield about a new dozen letters based on the Lopez inventory and the Emory finding aid. But I am hopeful that number might be low.

I have not spent much other time on the other documents from box 2 I received in the recent cache because reading Plath's own words is really, truly, an experience and I have been taking that information and kind of processing it, realigning the order of things as I am used to them. Which is wonderful.

All links accessed 23 January 2020.

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de

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

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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