Recent Sylvia Plath Books

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 (selected and ordered by Ted Hughes). This will have two covers: the original cover in a hardback and a more modern interpretation.

Lastly, in February I published two books. The first, The Search for Sylvia Plath, is a compilation of some of my essays on Plath. There are some new works in there as well, so I hope that it is something you will enjoy having access to. It is just available at the moment in paperback but I hope to have an ebook edition later this spring.

The second book is Sylvia Plath: A Bibliography. There is a hardback and a paperback for this as well as an ebook (Kindle) version.

If you do purchase my books, then I say sincerely: thank you so much!

All links accessed 4 March 2025.

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...

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