Barnes and Noble "Collectible Editions" of Sylvia Plath

HarperCollins has teamed up with Barnes and Noble to produce a book in their Collectible Edition Series. The book, as you may have surmised, is by one Sylvia Plath. The book is a combined The Bell Jar and Collected Poems.

Coming in at 688 pages, the cover price is $25. ISBN: 978-0-06-2-97354-2. Bizarrely, when I searched Amazon I saw that the price is double!

The endpapers are a knockout!

This is a book that was dreamed up a long while ago by Ted Hughes. In fact, he wrote an introduction on a proposed edition of a joint Collected Poems and The Bell Jar. I like Hughes' introduction very much and you can find it printed in his Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose. Many foreign editions of Plath's work have even included both such as Opere (Italian) and Ouevres (French). You can view their covers on A celebration, this is.

This Barnes and Noble edition repeats some of HarperCollins' perversions to Plath's text (which I discuss in "Textual Variation"). It includes the usual Foreword by Frances McCullough and Lois Ames' Afterword (which prints "Mad Girl's Love Song"; and so for the first time that poem appears in a volume with the rest of the poems in Plath's Collected Poems). Additionally, shockingly, "Daddy" appears in the Index for the first time, too. Joyce Carol Oates' well-known essay "Sylvia Plath and the Death Throes of Romanticism" is printed, too.

All links accessed 25 March 2020

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...

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de...

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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