Lois Ames Collection of Sylvia Plath

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 highly raised eyebrows! It will be interesting to see if and when the late Lois Ames' estate offers her Plath research materials to an archive or via an auction; to see if any pilfered Plath is included."

Furthermore, I recall reading in Anne Sexton papers at Texas (Austin) that she treated Lois Ames who had a sheaf of letters from Plath and Hughes to Herbert Hitchen, a Pastor of the Unitarian Church of Northampton, Massachusetts, 1958-1966, and an avid collector of Irish literature who was born in Norland, Yorkshire. In a 1967-1968 letter from Ames to Anne Sexton, she wrote the following:

It will be interesting to see what these three boxes yield.

All links accessed 12 October 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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