Sylvia Plath: Thunder Stealer

It is true. Sylvia Plath stole someone's thunder. She did it twice. To Ted Hughes, no less, within months of marrying him.

In the first days of October 1956, Sylvia Plath was at Whitstead in Cambridge, England, writing a blitzkrieg of letters to Ted Hughes and receiving a nearly equal amount of letters from him. It was a daily thing. Reading these letters leaves one probably feeling breathless.

According to her calendars, on the 8th and the 11th of October, Plath was at work writing a story called "The Wishing Box", and it was here that she stole Hughes' thunder. In the story, Agnes Higgins is envious of her husband Harold Higgins' dreams. The end of the story is grim as Agnes takes an overdose of pills. But before this, Plath's protagonist writes about two of her husbands' dreams in particular...

Agnes wrote of the former, "Harold dreamed that a red fox ran through his kitchen, grievously burnt, its fur charred black, bleeding from several wounds." And of the latter,

Harold was particularly fond of his fox dreams; they recurred often. So, notably, did his dream of the giant pike. "There was this pond," Harold informed Agnes one sultry August morning, "where my cousin Albert and I used to fish; it was chock full of pike. Well, last night I was fishing there, and I caught the most enormous pike you could imagine—it must have been the great-great-grandfather of all the rest; I pulled and pulled and pulled, and still he kept coming out of that pond.

These are, of course, the basis for Ted Hughes' poems "The Thought-Fox" and "Pike". But Sylvia Plath published them in Granta in January 1957. This is about 8 months before The New Yorker printed "The Thought-Fox" on 31 August 1957 and two and a half years before "Pike" was published in Audience in Summer 1959.

If you benefited from this post or any content on the Sylvia Plath Info Blog, my website for Sylvia Plath (A celebration, this is), and @sylviaplathinfo on Twitter, then please consider sending me a tip via PayPal. Thank you for at least considering! All funds will be put towards my Sylvia Plath research.

All links accessed 27 December 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

Search This Blog