Back in 2020, an unfinished drawing by Sylvia Plath appeared, and sold, via auction . The winner was a lucky person, as Sylvia Plath drawings are rare and unique. The drawing does not appear in 2013's Sylvia Plath: Drawings . The reason being it first appeared at auction in 2006, so it probably was no longer in Frieda Hughes' possession as was the case with the rest of these drawings that were part of the Mayor Gallery exhibition and sale. Likely as not because there was so little information about it; though there are unfinished and unidentified works included in that book. Annually, around May for some reason, I search for this church. Plath's life is so well-documented that one practically knows her whereabouts for any given day. Using her letters and journals and pocket calendars, I created a list of all the times she mentioned drawing or sketching something in an effort to trace this unfinished village church scene. Based on what is visible, I did not think it was Engl...

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 (sele...

I am grateful to Amanda Golden for letting me know the other day that Yale University's Beinecke Library has acquired two Plath family collections. The basic archival accession records are linked below. Main collection  (21 boxes) Addition  (2 boxes) There is not much to go on at this point in time, but the main collection includes "Correspondence, writings, photographs, printed material, artwork, personal papers, records, realia, and other papers by or relating to Sylvia Plath and the Plath family." And the addition has "Books, correspondence, photographic prints, audiovisual material, stamp collection, and other papers created by, or, related to Sylvia Plath and the Plath family." It may be a year or so before the collection is open to research; however, some parts will be closed until 1 January 2059. There are possibly other criteria that may allow for the closed materials to be made available. In addition to holding Sylvia Plath materials, there are likely d...

The publishing history of Sylvia Plath's books has been one of time (duration) and improvement. It is an endlessly fascinating subject, how Sylvia Plath has been edited since she passed away. The period of 1963 to 1974 in particular could be a thesis. But this blog post is concerned with those books published starting in 1975. Letters Home came out in 1975 in the US and the following year in the UK. This was followed by Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams  in 1977 and 1979, Collected Poems in 1982, and  The Journals of Sylvia Plath  (abridged; and in the US only) in 1982. That is four major volumes in seven years.  The Journals were reissued worldwide in an unabridged format eighteen years after the original version in 2000, which was two years after the passing of Ted Hughes and about four or five years after he and his sister Olwyn turned over control of the Estate of Sylvia Plath to Frieda and the late Nicholas Hughes.  Ariel (first published in 1965 in ...

It is time for HarperCollins to reset and reissue Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar . (Faber needs to do this too though for different reasons .) Get rid of the Foreword by Frances McCullough and eradicate the "Biographical Note" by Lois Ames. Let Plath's novel stand on its own and speak for itself. McCullough's piece is fine and interesting, but the 25th anniversary edition is even nearly 30 years old at this point; and Ames' "contribution" has festered with biographical and factual inaccuracies for more than 53 years.  There are a number of textual problems with the US edition to begin with, as I explored in an essay written in 2012 . But the Biographical Note by the late Lois Ames is in the cross hairs of my ire today. Page numbers here refer to the 1971 edition of the book. On page 282 there are two gaffs that that are shameful. The first is the statement that Plath won the Mademoiselle short fiction contest in August 1951. In fact, she won it in June...

For the Arvon course on Sylvia Plath's Prose that I co-taught with Heather Clark in June 2023 in Yorkshire , I re-read The Bell Jar  making note of the events Esther Greenwood experiences that source back to something lived by Sylvia Plath. For example, we know Plath resided at the Barbizon, which she morphed into the Amazon in the novel. The aim here was to develop, as it was, a "key" to The Bell Jar .  This key as structured right now has three columns. The first column is the scene from the novel--a word, a phrase, a sentence, etc. The second column is the chapter and page number for reference, using the first Heinemann edition (a photocopy of it!). The third column, then, is information about the source: a reference to a letter, a journal, or some other "thing" (that's a technical term) that came out of a direct experience Sylvia Plath had.  This project is something that I had long wanted to do and it helped me develop how I would present the novel to t...