Who's Who at Sylvia Plath's Smith College

Sylvia Plath mentions a lot of people in letters and journals that she studied under and worked with at Smith College. Our friend Tim, known on Twitter as @ProjectPlath, sent me a 1957 Smith College Hamper, their yearbook. This is the year before Plath began teaching there. As I was looking through it, a new world opened; faces attaching themselves to names familiar.

So, here are some close-ups of people Plath knew. I do not have the Hamper's for the years Plath was a student there, so undoubtedly there are more people that could be shown. But I hope this is a good start. The names identified are those Plath had as teachers or advisers (or otherwise knew) and mentioned in letters, journals, calendars, etc. either when she was a student or a teacher, or both!

Alice N. Davis (standing, I think), Director of the Vocational Office

Benjamin Wright, President

Charles Jarvis Hill, English Department and Assistant to the President

Dr. Marion Booth (standing, center), College Physician and Professor of Bacteriology and Public Health

Eleanor Terry Lincoln (seated, hands together), Class Dean (1959) and English Department

Helen Whitcomb Randall, English Department, Dean of the college, and director of Honor Board

Mary Mensell, Director of Scholarships

William Bodden, Treasurer and Controller -- Plath liked him because he paid her award and prize money.

Here are the departments for the 1956-1957 year.

Art: Priscilla Paine Van der Poel (seated, second from left), Mervin M. Jules (standing third from left), and Mr. H. George Cohen (not pictured)

Botany (left image): Kenneth E. Wright (left image, man in the middle), also her adviser Freshman year.
Psychology (right image): Elsa Margareeta Siipola (seated, by window).

Chemistry: Kenneth Wayne Sherk (seated, hand on paper).

Classics: Edward Washburn Spofford
Not in 1956-1957 yearbook

English: Plath had and mentioned a ton of them. She replaced Betty Isobelle Bandeen as English 11 and shared an office with Katherine Gee Hornbeak. Anthony Hecht is rocking that beard.

French: Madeleine Guilleton (standing, far left).

German: Marie Schnieders (seated, left) and Marion Sonnenfeld (standing, right).

History: Elisabeth Ahlgrimm Koffka (seated, third from right) and Klemens Van Klemperer (standing, second from left, just his head is visible), Sidney Monas (standing, second from right).

Physics William Taussig Scott (standing second from left, with bow tie)

Religion: Virginia Corwin (seated, middle) and Stephen Trowbridge Crary (standing, second from left).

Russian: George Gibian (seated, left)

Sociology: Neal Breaule DeNood (bottom right photo, seated second from left, with mustache)

Spanish: Manuel E. Durán (seated, left, with pipe)

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All links accessed 18 December 2019.

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...

Amy C. Rea Reviews Heather Clark's Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

Here’s a thing about me: I’m a voracious reader, but very rarely have a physically based emotional response to something I’m reading. I don’t laugh out loud, I don’t cry, both of which I do when watching movies. It’s not that I don’t find things funny or sad when I read, but apparently I need more of a visual cue. So it’s telling that when I got to the end of Dr. Heather Clark’s new biography of Sylvia Plath, Red Comet , I cried. It’s not as if I didn’t know how the story ended. But the level of detail and analysis Clark brings to her study of Plath is so detailed, and her examination of those brutal last weeks so deeply explored, that it broke my heart. Clark has done some tremendously important and much-needed work with this biography. It would be remiss of me not to note the aid she received from Peter K. Steinberg and the work he did compiling Plath’s Letters . Clark clearly spent a great deal of time studying these source materials, as well as others that were not available ...

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