Sylvia Plath's Cambridge Papers

The archival finding aid is many things. It is a textual map. It serves as a basic outline of a collection. It is also a key. It provides information, sometimes minute (item level) and sometimes very broad and general.

The Plath mss II finding aid is a wonderful document which was created by the Lilly Library in 1977, the year of the collection's acquisition from Aurelia Schober Plath. It has been online for as long as I can remember and may be one of my most frequented web pages.

When I was rummaging... I mean... when I was on my recent very serious research trip which helped to put the finishing touches on my current book project (the final manuscript of which was submitted recently), I went through boxes 8-15 methodically, folder by folder, and for the most part page by page. I spent the most time in boxes 13 through 15, perhaps, for no other reason than it was material with which I barely spent much time reading on previous research trips.

In box 13, folders 2, 3, and 4 hold papers Plath wrote for various courses she took on her Fulbright at Newnham College. Folders 5 through 7, the finding aid tells us, has "notes of readings, a chart for dating writers' works and copies of the Tripos exams. 598 p."

In folder 5, I identified three items that should probably belong in folder 2. Two of the three are clearly dated papers, one is undated.

Whitstead

"The Republic" (Books i-iv): Different Conceptions of Justice, no date (but written circa 7-8 May 1956). 12 typed pages with instructor comments and Plath's Whitstead, 4 Barton Road address typed in the top right. While this is undated, Plath's calendar indicates on 7 and 8 May that she was at work on "justice in Republic". In a second calendar, Plath records her paper was 17 pages long; and that she wrote, actually, two papers. So it is a bit confusing but it is certainly conceivable this is one of them.

"Ethics of Aristotle", 31 May 1956. 4 typed pages with underlining and holograph corrections most likely by Plath. In late May and early June Plath was in full Aristotle mode. She stayed up reading late on the 30th and commented in her calendar that she wrote her paper on the 31st, corroborated by the date on the typescript.

"Aristotle's conception of (i) the Magnanimous Man; (ii) the Perfect Friend; and (iii) the Contemplative Man", 5 June 1956. 10 typed pages with holograph corrections most likely by Plath. At the same time she worked on this paper (including the reading of the texts), Plath wrote "Crystal Gazer". In discussing the paper with Krook, she experienced "enlightenment". Plath composed, on the day of supervision, "Tinker Jack and the Tidy Wives".

Plath has a note in her Heffer's desk calendar that supervisions were primarily in the Mill Lane Lecture rooms. Dr. Krook's were, however, in the Department of Mineralogy and Petrology. This was possibly in the Sedgwick Museum on Downing Street/DowningPlace.

While I discussed these papers with the reference archivist, it is unclear if the documents will be moved to folder 2 or if they will remain where they are. One argument for keeping them in folder 5 is that if they have been cited before it might confuse people who have worked with that article, chapter, book, etc. and come to see the original But it might also be possible to move them and to include a note in the finding aid that reads "formerly in folder 5". Since these works do not appear in the list of papers in Folder 2, it appears they were never with the other assignments. So it is not a case of something not being put back in the wrong place.

If you benefited from this post or any content on the Sylvia Plath Info Blog, my website for Sylvia Plath (A celebration, this is), and @sylviaplathinfo on Twitter, then please consider sending me a tip via PayPal. Thank you for at least considering!

All links accessed 11 April 2022.

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...

Some final photographs of Sylvia Plath

Susan O'Neill-Roe took a series of photographs of Sylvia Plath and her children from October to late November (or maybe early December) 1962 while she was a day nanny/mother's help at Court Green. From nearby Belstone , it was a short drive to North Tawton and the aid she provided enabled Plath to complete the masterful October and November poems and also to make day or overnight trips to London for poetry business and other business. Some of O'Neill-Roe's photographs are well-known. However, a cache of photographs formed a part of the papers of failed biographer Harriet Rosenstein. They were sold separately from the rest of her papers that went to Emory. I was fortunate enough to see low resolution scans of them a while back so please note these are being posted today as mere reference quality images. There are two series here. The first of the children with Plath dressed in red and black. (This should be referred to in the future, please, as Plath's Stendhal-c...

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