"Hail and farewell. Hello, goodbye."

The selling of my entire Sylvia Plath library to Utica University posted yesterday may have forecasted this blog post.

Effective today the fifteen-year-old Sylvia Plath Info Blog is on hiatus. Whether it is temporary, semi-permanent, or permanent is yet to be determined. (There is still one blog post drafted...) This decision is the result of several years of serious thought, reflection, and deliberation. I have one or two current projects/obligations that I will honor.

This hiatus includes the Sylvia Plath Info Twitter social media platform (plathform?), started a decade ago in June 2012.

My website "A celebration, this is"---which I began twenty-four years ago in 1998---may be updated from time to time, but no longer with such frequency. Ownership of the domain is set to expire in late 2023 or early 2024. It will not be renewed. I will entertain offers if someone or some entity is interested in buying both the domain and its content. Otherwise, please check the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to find content once the URL disappears.

Please note: Effective today I will no longer be able to assist researchers with any queries.

Thank you all from the bottom of my heart for your support and friendship over the last few decades. I simply cannot express how you each aided me in the work I produced and motivated me on the projects on which I worked. The true privilege of my time working on Sylvia Plath has been sharing any and all information with you and ushering into print so much of her writing. However, I have reached a point in my life---in my "career", if you will---where I feel as though it is time to leave. Thank you all, sincerely, very, very much,

Sincerely yours,

Peter K. Steinberg

If you benefit from 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 26 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...

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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