Update from the Sylvia Plath Archive: Day 1

Today was the first in-person archival research trip in many years. My first at Indiana since March of 2015. It was a truly strange feeling to be traveling again by airplane; and to stay in a hotel. I took a walk around campus and downtown Bloomington when I arrived and enjoyed the clear skies and signs of spring.

A hill full of daffodils above Campus River

This my sixth visit to the Lilly Library (2002, 2003, 2010, 2012, 2015, 2022). I began the day with Plath mss which consists of the "scrap paper" Plath herself sold to a London book dealer in 1961. She knew the papers were going to join those of Ted Hughes (Hughes mss) at Indiana University and it is a thrill to work with these papers in particular. And knowing that Plath knew where they were header---in her lifetime---makes these papers, among all the other archival documents that exist, seem more significant in some ways.

After Plath mss, I went on the Plath mss II, and looked at a few boxes I wanted to spend more time in, particularly boxes 8, 9, 10, and 13. Towards the end of the afternoon I dipped into a small box of Plath mss III which is smaller format works of art on paper including a pastel, some watercolors, and a lot of line-drawings. Having never really looked at the art work before in all my previous trips, I was interested to see what these were like.

Happily, through all this work, I learned a few new things, looked at a lot of new things---how I missed her diploma from Newnham College I do not know.

And after that, tired of concentratedly examining papers and notes and stories and other pieces and what not, I dipped into the infuriatingly assembled typescripts of Letters Home. While I want to be a nice person about it, I just cannot. What a jumbled trash it is. How much is her fault or the fault sins of sloppy researchers it is hard to say... But I was looking to see what kinds of commentary Mrs. Plath wrote that was cut out of the final book.

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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...

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