Update from the Sylvia Plath Archive: Day 3

My third and final day in the archive was much like the first two: inundated with the papery artefacts of Sylvia Plath's life. Yesterday I ended the day in Box 15 which has a disbound publications scrapbook that with items from 1949 to 1959. The bulk of the materials are before 1955, with a smattering of later stuff which lead me to conclude that possibly this was a scrapbook created by Aurelia Plath. The original pages on which these documents were taped do not appear to be extant, so if they were annotated (and by whom) is a mystery. There are a few examples on some of the clippings with Mrs. Plath's and Olive Higgins Prouty's handwriting (particularly 1959). Very interesting though. The scrapbook is in 66 folders (one folder per page, basically) and it has payment stubs, letters, and clippings. And that was what I intended to start today with.

However, I decided to veer off course when I was settling in for the morning and called to see a First Folio of Shakespeare. It was on display but the kind archivists spoiled me and removed it from the exhibit case and brought it into the reading room. It was not as big as I had imagined it would be; but it was every bit as wonderful as I hoped. I asked to see The Tempest, the first play in the volume, as you might imagine. After The Bell Jar, it is probably the most famous book on the planet, and I had always wanted to see one.

Back to Plath...The rest of box 15 are folders and envelopes that tell a rather convoluted story. Perhaps this might be developed into a blog post? I took 117 photographs of this stuff so it could be time-consuming effort.

Because I had somehow been efficient with my researches, today was more or less a free-style kind of day and since I had worked with the Plath mss box, a box from Plath mss III, and Plath mss II boxes 8-15 exhaustively and exclusively, I called the boxes of correspondence (boxes 1 through 6a). (The Plath collection goes up to Plath mss XII now, but I had no need to see IV-XII.)

This research trip ended looking at Boxes 2 and 6a, which hold correspondence. Just browsing, really, and it was enjoyed to hold for the first time dozens of letters I worked with copies of during The Letters of Sylvia Plath project.

There is a lot of new information to assimilate into what I already knew, or already researched and even, yes, stuff I forgot. My hope is that some of the materials I worked with might be highlighted here on the blog or near future projects. (Beyond the new future I cannot think.) One of my goals in coming here was to make sure that for a current project, which will be the subject of a post in the very near future, I had not missed anything.

The Lilly Library was closed for renovations in 2020 and part of 2021 and so they are still in the process of getting everything back in place, so unfortunately some of the boxes in Plath mss II that I wanted to see were not available. The building is beautiful, the reading room is exquisite. The staff at the library are super and as I have done so in a few books already, I would like to thank Sarah McElroy Mitchell for her excellent help and service as this trip was planned and executed.

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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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