Sylvia Plath first worked on her short story called "The Smoky Blue Piano" in the fall of 1954, possibly for her short story writing course with Alfred Kazin. By the 27th of December 1954, she was rewriting it. She submitted it to the Ladies Home Journal the following day and it was rejected in January 1955 with a personal note. She rewrote it and sent it back out, but it was rejected again in February because it famously lacked an "indefinable something" (LV1 881). Plath, ever the diligent and persistent writer, was at work on the story again on 12 August 1955 when she sent it to Woman's Day (per her pocket diary) and experimented with hair styles.
She maintained a list of periodicals to which she sent "The Smoky Blue Piano", and this included McCall's, Collier's, The American, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and the Woman's Home Companion. The 12 August submission, per this list, says Everywoman's, not Woman's Day.
The story was probably inspired by some of her summer 1954 experiences at Harvard Summer School when she was living at the Bay State Apartments on Massachusetts Avenue.
Plath later revised the story in 1957 when she was living in Cambridge, England, and changed the setting a bit. She wrote to her brother that she sent it "(...to every magazine in America)" and that some agent or other thought it was "quite excellent" and that the agent would "send it about here for me: I changed the background to London, cosmopolitan as I am getting to be." (LV2 130).
One scene in the story interested me a lot. Please do not get me wrong, I like the whole story, but, it was one scene that intrigued me. The story features two flatmates, the narrator and Jill, and revolves around their lives, dating, lying, and, of course, a smoky blue piano. Plath writes that Jill "went to bed early, humming 'Almost Like Being In Love' while I sat up in the living room to quiet myself with the latest Simenon thriller" (Collected Prose 323).
Now I like a good murder mystery so long as it is not gratuitous, graphic, or vulgar in its descriptions. Christie? I'm team Marple. Poirot can pound sand. PD James's Adam Dalgliesh is phenomenal (although, I felt Innocent Blood was her absolute masterpiece). I remember liking Rendell's Wexford; and who can forget Holmes's influence? Anyway…Simenon. I recognized the name because in a previous past life last century/last millennium I shelved books in the mystery section of a Borders bookstore. The spines of the books were white; the lettering black. And they were slim. I did not know much about him at all. So, Sylvia Plath led me to Georges Simenon and to the library. (Sadly buying books is no longer in my budget.)
Shortly after this mention of Simenon, the narrator tells us she "sat up that night too, reading about a homicidal butler with a split personality, while waiting for Jill to come home" (324). So now I had to read Simenon to see if I could possibly identify this novel. His most famous detective is Jules Maigret who features in 75 novels and thirty-ish short stories. By 1957, Simenon had published about 50 Maigret novels. The ones published "latest" to 1957 are: Maigret and the Minister aka Maigret and the Calame Report (1955); Maigret and the Headless Corpse (1955); Maigret Sets a Trap (1955); Maigret's Failure (1956); and Maigret Enjoys Himself aka None of Maigret's Business / Maigret's Little Joke (1957). I have now read them all--- thanks to a variety of local libraries and Interlibrary loan---and while I did not come across any with a homicidal butler, the novels were simply marvelous and enjoyable. Very few, in fact, even feature butlers! Simenon might still have written about a homicidal butler in another work; he wrote 400 books, after all. Not every inquiry yields results, but I am a much happier reader having read Maigret. And perhaps Plath was writing in just the regular old mystery trope of the butler committing a crime. No matter what, I am grateful for the reference. But perhaps I was wrong? The Maigret books are not necessarily "thrillers". I may have to start all over again.
I really liked this passage from Maigret in Court. It spoke to me.
Typescripts of "The Smoky Blue Piano" are held by the Lilly Library (just two pages), Emory University, and Smith College. The Smith copy was my copy text for the book. There are five total typescripts at Emory but four of them were not typed by Plath. They were likely done in the mid-1970s as the Plath Estate was preparing Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. The Emory draft has the narrator reading an "Agatha Christie thriller." The drafts of the story likely not typed by Plath modifies this to "the latest murder mystery on the market." The Smith draft (featured above) scratched out Christie (poor thing), and wrote in Simenon.
An updated view of my bookcase from 2004, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2024, 2025, and now 2026!
Sure, having two that are face-out cheats the shelf space a little bit...
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All links accessed 30 May 2026.