Sylvia Plath Collections: "thought she might have been a town prostitute"

When J (for Joseph) Mallory Wober first saw Sylvia Plath at a Labour Club meeting, he thought she might have been a town prostitute. He was born, a year to the day, after Warren Plath. After that he lived for a while in Bombay, India, arriving in Liverpool, England from Bombay, India, on 9 December 1945. Wober was a student at King's College, Cambridge, and lived on Peas Hill, at the time he met Plath.

We are told at the beginning of these transcripts that most of the interview was not recorded because apparently Wober "forced" Rosenstein to "march" through Hyde Park, Belgravia, and Sloane Square. Exaggerate much?

Wober told Rosenstein that Plath's "eyes were most expressive of the intensity of her existence." While in Cambridge, Wober asserts "her time was spent fighting off people who recognized her as a special kind of person." She was "beset" with admirers. Around Plath he felt "illumined" and more alive. He felt in the end that he was essentially just a station stop for Plath on her train journey through life.

She was "capabale of high awareness. And she could be unaware or insensitive to somebody else but, nonetheless, the capacity of awareness is there and she put it in her art."

Some other observation from his typed interview notes, Wober considers The Bell Jar to be a trashy book. He says that Plath was, in Medieval terms regarding Christian love, a "witch".

According to Plath, Wober's background is "Moorish Jews, Russian Jews, Syrian Jews, etc." (Letters Vol I, 1014). The interview ends on the bombshell that Gail Crowther tweeted about a few days ago: that Wober is a distant relation to Richard Sassoon. After inquiring of Plath Sassoon's background, Wober informed her of their relation but could not recall her reaction.

It is, after all, a small world. This kind of thing happens all the time. Another example is that Peter Davison dated Elizabeth Sigmund.

At some point after Cambridge Wober came to the US. He departed NY in late August 1958 and arrived at Plymouth on 4 September 1958 on board the French Line Liberte. Wober became a psychologist and authored the book The Use and Abuse Of Television (2013), Media and Monarchy (2000), Television and Nuclear Power (1992), and Television and Social Control (1988), among others.

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...

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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