The publishing history of Sylvia Plath's books has been one of time (duration) and improvement. It is an endlessly fascinating subject, how Sylvia Plath has been edited since she passed away. The period of 1963 to 1974 in particular could be a thesis. But this blog post is concerned with those books published starting in 1975. Letters Home came out in 1975 in the US and the following year in the UK. This was followed by Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams  in 1977 and 1979, Collected Poems in 1982, and  The Journals of Sylvia Plath  (abridged; and in the US only) in 1982. That is four major volumes in seven years.  The Journals were reissued worldwide in an unabridged format eighteen years after the original version in 2000, which was two years after the passing of Ted Hughes and about four or five years after he and his sister Olwyn turned over control of the Estate of Sylvia Plath to Frieda and the late Nicholas Hughes.  Ariel (first published in 1965 in ...

It is time for HarperCollins to reset and reissue Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar . (Faber needs to do this too though for different reasons .) Get rid of the Foreword by Frances McCullough and eradicate the "Biographical Note" by Lois Ames. Let Plath's novel stand on its own and speak for itself. McCullough's piece is fine and interesting, but the 25th anniversary edition is even nearly 30 years old at this point; and Ames' "contribution" has festered with biographical and factual inaccuracies for more than 53 years.  There are a number of textual problems with the US edition to begin with, as I explored in an essay written in 2012 . But the Biographical Note by the late Lois Ames is in the cross hairs of my ire today. Page numbers here refer to the 1971 edition of the book. On page 282 there are two gaffs that that are shameful. The first is the statement that Plath won the Mademoiselle short fiction contest in August 1951. In fact, she won it in June...

For the Arvon course on Sylvia Plath's Prose that I co-taught with Heather Clark in June 2023 in Yorkshire , I re-read The Bell Jar  making note of the events Esther Greenwood experiences that source back to something lived by Sylvia Plath. For example, we know Plath resided at the Barbizon, which she morphed into the Amazon in the novel. The aim here was to develop, as it was, a "key" to The Bell Jar .  This key as structured right now has three columns. The first column is the scene from the novel--a word, a phrase, a sentence, etc. The second column is the chapter and page number for reference, using the first Heinemann edition (a photocopy of it!). The third column, then, is information about the source: a reference to a letter, a journal, or some other "thing" (that's a technical term) that came out of a direct experience Sylvia Plath had.  This project is something that I had long wanted to do and it helped me develop how I would present the novel to t...

Sylvia Plath's mother loved to tell the story about how her daughter co-opted some of her own experiences in the lines in the fourth stanza of the poem "The Disquieting Muses" which read, In December last year, a random thought popped in my own dismal head and that song mentioned, "the glowworm song". The reason this song and this stanza came to the forefront of my mind was the lovable scene in Love, Actually , where the children are on stage for their Christmas nativity play--the one with multiple lobsters that were present at the birth of J. C. They are singing and in costumes and what not..., so it is natural that I thought of Plath. Anyway, Wikipedia to the rescue with this article on The Glow-Worm  (aka "Das Glühwürmchen").  "The Glow-Worm Song" appears in the Paul Lincke operetta Lysistrata (1902).The article includes some translated-into-English lyrics and some historical information such as the fact the lyricist Johnny Mercer later r...

Sylvia Plath was in Paris five times in one calendar year. More specifically, she visited Paris five times from December 1955 to August 1956, that's within nine months. Her first stay was from 20 December to 31 December 1955.  She touched her feet in Paris again upon her return from Nice and the south of France on 8-9 January 1956.  Plath was in Paris for another long stretch from 24 March to 6 April 1956, leaving on the 6th to go from Paris through Strasbourg and then into Kehl, Germany, and onward to Munich, with Gordon Lameyer.  Then she spent the first portion of her honeymoon in Paris with her husband (and mother) from 22 June to 5 July. On her way back from Spain to England, she and Hughes stopped once more in Paris on 23 August until the 28th, this time without Plath's mother, though they were joined by Warren Plath.  Recently I was in Europe and had the opportunity to layover briefly in Paris, so I maximized the opportunity to do something I had never done be...