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...

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Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

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