A Reversed Sylvia Plath Photograph

In February, I was looking at some photographs of Sylvia Plath and I was seeing very similar hair styles as the photos were all taken within a few months in 1956. But one of the images made me pause. I was looking at it and looking at it when, of a sudden, it hit me that her hair part was on the left (thus backwards). Back in May 2013, I wrote about this kind of thing happening---photographs being printed in reverse---in Parting Ways with Sylvia Plath.

The photograph in question was one of four that appeared in the 26 May 1956 issue of Varsity in which Plath was trying on dresses, bathing suits, and the like for a feature fashion article published as "Sylvia Plath tours the stores and forecasts May Week Fashions."

Earlier in that week, on 22 May, Plath visited the Robert Sayle's, Joshua Taylor's, and Vogue shops in Cambridge. It was that day too that she wrote the accompanying fashion article. At 2 p.m. she met Ted Hughes and sunned in the yard and then, naturally, studied Plato. In addition to this, she sent some of Hughes's poems to Poetry, The New Yorker, Atlantic, and Harper's. She also ironed shirts.

Right, so the photographs that appeared in the article are below:

You can see in photos two, three, and four, that her hair kind of swooshes in a wave down the left side of her forehead. And, she's got something (a watch, probably? but possibly also a bracelet?) on her (left) wrist. But in that first photograph, the accessory is on her other (right) wrist and, as well, Plath's hair part is on the left. It is reversed. Below is the way it should have appeared.

And, in working on this post I was reviewing other photographs of Sylvia Plath and spotted another one that was reversed. But that is a blog post for another day...

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 17 February 2021.

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