International Autograph Auctions Europe had an auction today of  Autograph Letters, Historical Documents & Manuscripts . Sylvia Plath's unfinished drawing of a village church and cart was in  Lot 437 . Ted Hughes signed the back as a way to authenticate it as being drawn by his first wife. The estimate placed on the drawing was €2,400 - €3,600. This is roughly $2,173 - $3,912 and £1,847 - £3,325. The drawing sold for €3,000 /$3,257.78 /£2,758.86. All links accessed 24-25 March 2020.

Next week, on 25 March 2020, an unfinished drawing by Sylvia Plath will be up for auction via International Autograph Auctions Europe S.L. The official Lot number is Lot 437. Bidding can be done online. As far as I can tell the auction is going forward. The description for the auction reads: PLATH SYLVIA: (1932-1963) American Poet, wife of Ted Hughes from 1956 until her death. A good, original pencil drawing, unsigned, one page, 8vo, n.p., n.d. Plath has drawn an appealing image of an old street scene with an empty wooden cart abandoned in the foreground and several buildings in the immediate background including a church tower, the spire of which features a cross at its highest point and which Plath has carefully heightened in dark fountain pen ink. Annotated and signed to the verso in pencil, 'By Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes', by her husband, the English Poet Laureate. Any original item in the hand of Plath is extremely rare and desirable as a result of the poet's tr...

The following is a guest blog post by Di Beddow, who is currently researching "The Cambridge of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath" at Queen Mary University London, on a recently found collection of papers by and about Sylvia Plath. Thank you, Di! ~pks Cambridge can be cruel in the Winter as Sylvia Plath tells us in her letter of January 1956: "the atrocious food, the damp cold & the unsimpatico people" ( Letters Vol I , 1080). During the worst of times then, meeting up with the archivist at Newnham College recently (we became friends after finding much in common after my first visit to the archive) she told me that because of building work that had taken place at the college, she had uncovered a file which might cheer me a little. As luck would have it, Anne Thomson found the file of alumna, Sylvia Plath, who had attended the college as a Fulbright student from October 1955 to June 1957. Anne read through the file and appreciating that it contained very personal inf...