Christie's New York had an online auction that ended Friday, 17 September 2021, of a nice looking copy of the 1963 Heinemann edition The Bell Jar with Victoria Lucas as author.   In the auction of "The Exceptional Literature Collection of Theodore B. Baum: Part Two, the copy was Lot 355 . Theodore B. Baum (1935-    ) is an American cable television company executive. The details from the auction are: "First edition of Plath's thinly veiled autobiography published in England pseudonymously a month before her February 1963 death. Plath had returned to London with her two young children during the brutally cold winter of 1962, renting a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road (an address once inhabited by William Butler Yeats). Though that autumn had been a period of intense activity as she produced the poems that would comprise Ariel , depression nonetheless overtook her. The Bell Jar , her only novel, did not appear under her own name until 1967 and, in accordance with the wishes of...

There are moments in Sylvia Plath's journals and letters, as well as her poems and stories, where she provides enough information so that you might, if curious, take a walk with her words. In the last week or so I have been reading her journals and one such entry, one of many to be honest, sent me to Google Street View for the umpteenth time to see the view she described with her eyes. On 11 March 1957, Plath wrote her and entry about a walk down the Fen Causeway to a fish and chips shop. It  has been always an interesting one to me. A favorite, perhaps. Plath obsesses over the orange hue of the streetlights, and that color seems both ominous and ethereal in the way she uses it describing her scene. Even the color of the fried fish and chips, in one's mind, is orange-ish.  Where was she going with this idea? The presence of the gun, too, is a bit weird.  Towards the end of the entry the speaker and her male companion pass a monastery, then Plath writes, "The gla...

As Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes wended their way back to Massachusetts from their counter-clockwise trip across the continent of North America, one of their final stops before reaching Wellesley was to visit Uncle Frank and Aunt Louise Bowman Schober.   After they married in Winthrop in June 1942, the Schobers found themselves in Ohio for a spell before returning east. They settled in the university town of Villanova, outside of Philadelphia. The wedding photograph, right, was taken in front of the Bowman house at 27 Thornton Street, Winthrop.  Plath and Hughes had traveled somewhat hurriedly through the south after they stayed a few days with her Aunt Frieda Heinrichs, zooming through New Mexico (Carlsbad Caverns), Texas, Louisiana (New Orleans), Mississippi, Tennessee (Sewanee), Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania (Villanova). Please do read the Volume II of the Letters of Sylvia Plath as well as David Trinidad's wonderful essay, " On the Road with Sylvia and T...

Hello. Sylvia Plath sent the below post card of San Francisco's Lombard Street to her in-laws, Edith and William Hughes, on 3 August 1959. The original postcard recently sold via the Sotheby's auction. It was Lot 39 . This image of the front and back came from eBay, which is a much more affordable way to own a copy of this postcard! Whomever won it, and frankly those that won any of the lots, are very lucky people and I hope that the items are cherished.  The full text of the postcard appeared first in 2018's The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2 . ( Amazon | & remember, the Faber paperback published in 2019 has content not in the hardback: Amazon UK ).  If you are interested in Plath's cross country trip in the summer of 1959, and want to see how this postcard fits into the narrative of that excursion, then please read David Trinidad's wonderful essay " On the Road with Sylvia and Ted ." All links accessed 17 July 2021.