The last full day! I am sad but it has been a productive experience. A massive number of photographs to review, process, read, and assimiliate into the existing bank of knowledge on Sylvia Plath and the other figures that play in the story. And I want to say it is a real honor to have gotten to work with the papers the very week they opened for research and an absolute and sincere joy to relate some of the things I have seen to you. Thank you so much for reading.  I began day four working with Box 16, which I could not finish up on Thursday. Box 16 is Aurelia Schober Plath's papers, Diaries and notebooks. Fascinating documents. These consist of diaries she kept on trips to England and Europe as well as to write about her grandchildren visiting the US. It picks up from Box 15 which has earlier diaries and fragments up to the rather infamous summer of 1962 which has much shorthand at the crucial points, as well as pages that had been ripped out.  One of my favorite things in Box...

After leaving the Beinecke yesterday, I thought it might be poetic, or perhaps even prosaic, to talk a short walk up Prospect Street. Plath stayed at 238 Prospect Street and writes about it in The Bell Jar . During Esther Greenwood's visit to Buddy Willard, they "walked very slowly" in "the cold, black, three o'clock wind" from downtown New Haven "to the house where I was sleeping in the living-room on a couch that was too short because it only cost fifty cents a night instead of two dollars like most of the other places with proper beds" (1963, 63). It was dark when I got there as the library closed after sunset. This house is directly opposite Yale's chemistry facilities, and so you can imagine I wanted to go all the way, just like Buddy wanted to and visit the chemistry lab. It was, of course, famoulsy behind the Chemistry Lab where Buddy first kissed Esther Greenwood, chapped lips and all. There has been appreciable construction since I was...

It is nearly the end of day two here and I am still kind of processing what I saw on day one. This morning, for example, I read the letters from Assia Wevill to Mrs. Plath over coffee before the library opened and I am still not recovered. One of the items I was most excited to see is in Folder 1 of Box 14, Plath's personal papers. In this folder were sihlouettes dating from 1946 and 1956. The 1956 one was my focus as I remember all the time about Plath's writing about it in her journals. She did so on 30 March 1956 when she was pining for Richard Sassoon, enamoured of Ted Hughes, but spending a lot of time with Tony in advance of meeting up with Gordon! She wrote: 'Tony and I walked about and looked at paintings until a small man asked if he could cut my silouhette "comme un cadeau", so I stood in the middle of the square in the middle of Montmartre and gazed at the brilliant restaurants in the middle of a gathering crowd which ohed and ahed and which was just wh...

Snow, sleet, and rain greeted me today on my drive to New Haven. I have been to this city only one time before, about 20 or so years ago on a day trip to see the Plath Sites. Or, the Richard Norton sites, such as my 2001 or 2002 self knew. I was not impressed. Anyway, the atrocious weather may have been a blessing as the George Washington Bridge was sans  traffic. As was every other road I travelled to get here until I got here. The Merritt Parkway--a road which Sylvia Plath herself took on excursions to Manhattan--was fine. A few back-ups on hills, because apparently driving uphill in Connecticut is just as hard as running up them.  The last few miles seemed to take the most amount of time. Ah---anticipation.  The Beienecke Library recently opened the Plath Family Papers. Word or mouth was that there was nothing shocking or revolutionary in them, but that is not really what I am looking for as I look through them. Maybe I do not even know what it is I am looking for, but...

In the Spring 2026 catalog of new books issued by Faber , they are showing a cover design for the highly anticipated volume of The Poems of Sylvia Plath  edited by Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil. See page 46 for more details. Faber is releasing the paperback version of The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath  edited by me (aka Peter K. Steinberg) along with new editions of The Bell Jar  (page 26) and Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (page 26). The catalog text reads:  The definitive edition of Plath’s poetry for readers, scholars and students. Sylvia Plath’s first Collected Poems was published in 1981. This new volume draws on decades of research and almost doubles the content of that previous edition. The book is in two parts. It begins with the poems Plath composed in the last ten years of her life and on which her reputation is founded, and follows with those poems written in childhood and through her student years. In both sections the editors date, correct a...

The Beinecke Library has published the Plath Family Papers finding aid .   There is, as can be imagined, a lot to unpack with the finding aid and a cursory review of it also indicates that there are things within it that need to be cleaned up and corrected.  But it is an enticing textual and organizational look at the papers that comprise the collection.  There are many letters from Plath to various people which is exciting. These include, without a doubt, the original letters Plath sent to her brother Warren. The Lilly Library has copies. The letters to Mrs. Plath are itemized, but those to her brother are not (at the time of writing). So it is unclear at the moment if there are more letters. Researchers will be able to access the collection in the first week of December. Undoubtedly there will be much more to discuss in time.  In case you missed it, Yale issued a press release on 7 Novembe r about the collection. All links accessed 21 November 2025. Revised 24...

Yale's Beinecks Library has been busy of late in the Sylvia Plath archive world. The Beinecke acquired recently the Lois Ames collection of Sylvia Plath from James Cummings of New York.  Ames passed away in 2022 . The papers are unprocessed, but is comprised of three boxes with correspondence, writings, printed material, research material, photographs, and other papers compiled for a biography of Sylvia Plath.  You may remember from this blog post back in 2023 that Mrs Plath wrote a friend that Ames stole materials from the house at Elmwood Road. But, to reiterate,  "I forgot about some of the materials I acquired over the years, such as this nugget from a letter in April 1983 that Aurelia Schober Plath wrote to a friend Mary Ann Montgomery: 'Lois Ames never wrote a biography, although she had a grant to do so, interviewed me during a whole summer and stole both materials (manuscripts of Sylvia's) and snapshots from me' (Montgomery mss, Lilly). Holy highl...

In February, I posted on the acquisition of the "Plath Family papers" by the Beinecke Library at Yale. Due to the inquisitiveness of Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, we have learned that the papers will open in the next few weeks (this Autumn).  That's it. That's the post. More information perhaps when there is some to share.  In the meantime, last Friday, the 12th of September, saw the publication by the LSU Press of Julie's most recent book Lives Revised:  Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath .  Congratulations, Julie! All links accessed 18 September 2025.

The recent identification of three of Sylvia Plath's drawings was fun. I enjoyed discussing these with Anna Dykta and bouncing off ideas and discussing the nuances of Plath's artwork as well as her travels. The drawing of a dome/tower labelled "Paris rooftops" in Drawings  (page 30, 2013) was another of Plath's pen and ink works about which I wondered, for years: where is this? For a while I have been convinced this was not drawn in Paris. For a while I was convinced based on the evidence Plath left, that it was drawn in Madrid. She wrote in a 7 July 1956 letter to her mother, "If only you could see me now, sitting in haltar and shorts seven stories high above the modern tooting city of Madrid on our large private balcony with gay blue-and-yellow tiles on floor and wall-shelves, pots of geranium and ivy, and across, baroque towers and a blazing blue sky even now, going on eight p.m. Ted is inside writing on another fable and I just finished a detailed design ...

Back in 2020, an unfinished drawing by Sylvia Plath appeared, and sold, via auction . The winner was a lucky person, as Sylvia Plath drawings are rare and unique. The drawing does not appear in 2013's Sylvia Plath: Drawings . The reason being it first appeared at auction in 2006, so it probably was no longer in Frieda Hughes' possession as was the case with the rest of these drawings that were part of the Mayor Gallery exhibition and sale. Likely as not because there was so little information about it; though there are unfinished and unidentified works included in that book. Annually, around May for some reason, I search for this church. Plath's life is so well-documented that one practically knows her whereabouts for any given day. Using her letters and journals and pocket calendars, I created a list of all the times she mentioned drawing or sketching something in an effort to trace this unfinished village church scene. Based on what is visible, I did not think it was Engl...

In the last few months there have been a number of books published by and about Sylvia Plath. So, this is just a small post to acknowledge them.  Of course, there was The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath which Faber issued last September. The paperback was on schedule to be published this fall but it has been bumped to April 2026 to coincide with the publication of The Poems of Sylvia Plath edited by Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil .  Last August, Carl Rollyson's Sylvia Plath Day By Day Volume 2: 1955-1963  was published by the University of Mississippi Press. This was followed by his The Making of Sylvia Plath  in November 2024 and published by the same press. Also in November, Heather Clark's Sylvia Plath: A Very Short Introduction was brought out by the Oxford University Press. Faber issued a new edition of Sylvia Plath's The Bed Book in January with illustrations by Cindy Wume. And, on 3 July 2025, Faber are issuing "Heritage" editions of her Ariel (sele...

I am grateful to Amanda Golden for letting me know the other day that Yale University's Beinecke Library has acquired two Plath family collections. The basic archival accession records are linked below. Main collection  (21 boxes) Addition  (2 boxes) There is not much to go on at this point in time, but the main collection includes "Correspondence, writings, photographs, printed material, artwork, personal papers, records, realia, and other papers by or relating to Sylvia Plath and the Plath family." And the addition has "Books, correspondence, photographic prints, audiovisual material, stamp collection, and other papers created by, or, related to Sylvia Plath and the Plath family." It may be a year or so before the collection is open to research; however, some parts will be closed until 1 January 2059. There are possibly other criteria that may allow for the closed materials to be made available. In addition to holding Sylvia Plath materials, there are likely d...