International Autograph Auctions Europe had an auction today of  Autograph Letters, Historical Documents & Manuscripts .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 Call for Papers is by Maria Rovito, a Graduate Assistant and PhD student in American Studies at Penn State University. ~pks As the author Sylvia Plath exists within the Anglophone canon as the quintessential "madwoman" and tragic figure of mental illness and suicidality, new theoretical arguments must be made in order to unpack the question of illness within Plath's life and work. Although we view Plath as a woman with mental illness, we do not view her as a woman who was disabled, and who experienced other corporeal impairments beside her psychic pain. Not only this, but Plath has been unfairly pathologized by previous and current scholars, who only seek to analyze her poetry and writing using a medical analysis. This has influenced not only the cultural understandings of Plath, but how students treat her work as well. Ultimately, these practices have harmed both Plath as a cultural figure and the disabled Plath reader who is traumatized by these reading

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

Carl Rollyson ( website  | Twitter ) has had a passionate interest in Sylvia Plath for a long time. In 2013, he published his first biography of her as  American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath (St. Martin's Press). And he has followed this up with a second exploration into the life and afterlife of Sylvia Plath in the recently published The Last Days of Sylvia Plath (University Press of Mississippi). The book was scheduled to be published later this month, but this morning I learned while on Amazon that the book was published on 18 February. I immediately bought the Kindle edition because at $9, how could I resist!? So this post about the publication is overdue and I apologize for the late notice. ISBN: 978-1496821225. 264 pages. Cover price: $25.00. The book is available in  hardback  and in a  Kindle edition . From the Amazon page: Book Description Rollyson has written a unique, vital contribution to Plath studies. In many ways it’s a microbiography of Sy