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...