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.

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