Christie's Sells Victoria Lucas (Sylvia Plath) edition of The Bell Jar

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 her mother and Ted Hughes, was not published in the United States until 1971.

"Octavo. Original cloth; pictorial dust-jacket (very minor rubbing to extremities); custom box.

"Please note this lot is the property of a private individual."

The book was estimated at $3,000-$5,000. It sold for just a bit more: $16,250, which includes the buyer's premium. This is a very high price and while the copy is exceptionally nice looking, it might have gone for this price because at the time of writing there are no copies listed on ABEbooks.com or other rare book websites.

I have not kept track of what this book sells for historically at auction, but it might be an auction record for a copy not sold by Frieda Hughes. Those copies, naturally, are in a different stratosphere, to an extent.

Read more in this article that appeared on Fine Books & Collections.

All links accessed 17 September 2021.

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

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 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