Update from the Archive Day 4: The Plath Family Papers

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 16 was Mrs Plath using her daughter's 1956 small pocket calendar in the mid-1970s. Plath herself had filled in a couple of pages at the beginning and end, but the calendar part of it is bereft of her daily jottings. She was in Cambridge at the time using at least two other diaries... so I imagine she got this as a present but adopted using the other calendars instead.

Box 16 runs into... Box 17! And a continuation of the diaries. I did not explore them though I have no doubt there is interesting and rich material scattered throughout. In fact, each box I reviewed -- and Julie had the same feeling -- has something of value in it.

In box 10, there is a letter from Gordon Lameyer to Warren Plath from 2 September 1953 just after his sister's suicide attempt. Lameyer quotes Mrs Plath saying, "Whenever Sylvia entered a room, the place was illumined with sunshine and laughter." It is a sweet comment, and it is the way we feel about working with the archives pieces that remain and are now accessible.

I spent the last part of the day re-reviewing the photographs in Box 47. I was at a different table and the light was a little better and I wanted to try to take better photographs of some of the "new" photographs. There are a few photos of Sylvia Plath with Ted Hughes and Warren Plath that were taken in Paris on 26 August 1956 at the Musée de Cluny. I wanted to see if I could identify the exact locations and happily I could.

There was more comparison fun, such as this photograph of Ted Hughes in the summer of 1959. Not the thermos/flask as compared to Sylvia Plath's drawing of it (with thanks to Anna Dykta for spotting the likeness).

There is a lot more to discover in these family papers. A lot to assess and reacess. For those interested, there are probably about 100 "new" photographs of Sylvia Plath from across the years. There many new photographs of her children, too. A decent number of them likely taken by Susan O'Neill-Roe and of which were referred to in several letters from Plath to her family. There is at least one more post I want to write about these papers and these three and a half days but I need a moment, a night, perhaps two, to synthesize my thoughts about it. Today was a great day for Plath scholars here as in addition to me there was Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, Catherine Rankovic, and Amanda Golden. It was nice to see them all and I appreciate you all reading. 

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