2020 started off with an absolute Sylvia Plath bang with the news that Emory University purchased the Harriet Rosenstein papers related to Sylvia Plath. A few of us knew about it in late 2019, but when the collection would open for research was unclear. Well, they were opened up first thing . I hired Emily Banks, a graduate student at Emory, to take photographs of the papers. Throughout January and into very early February, Emily sent me daily files and it was kind of a mad flurry new information. It resulted in a streak of blog posts that I hope conveyed what it was like for me to read the files and try to process all the information. The best way to see these posts would be to look at the January and, respectively, February blog archives.  There are other blog posts in there, too. For example, I was privileged to join Janet Badia, Heather Clark, and Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick in Seattle for an MLA conference panel on Plath studies and Assia Wevill. It was great fun, though o...

So what did you think of Sylvia Plath in 2019? It seemed to be a year dominated by Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom , the short story published in the UK and the US in January and then which started appearing in translations. It is wonderful a newly published short story could kind of captivate its readers across the globe, which I think is a great sign that Plath--and her work--is in demand. As in the past, this is a look back at the year as I lived it. It seems I spent most of January publicizing the story on the blog, as well as the real Mary Ventura, who was a friend of Plath's in Wellesley in the mid-to-late 1940s. I spent most of the month of January, too, packing up my belongings and changing jobs and states. Sadly I still do not feel settled but, well, I will get there eventually. It is weird not being in Plath's backyard any longer after twenty years… But, you probably do not want to read my moaning, you want to read about Plath. At any rate, I think Mary Ve...

The Campus Cat , Commencement 1952 In the spring of 1952, Sylvia Plath was a very active young woman at Smith College. Completing her sophomore year, Plath was doing well academically, but also socially and in terms of extracurricular activities. She was involved with Press Board, covering campus events as well as sending out news stories to local papers. But she was also involved with a small publication called the The Campus Cat . The Campus Cat was a publication created by Smith students in 1918. Its contents provided information to the campus about going-ons, events, activities, and poked fun at the rituals, trials, and stresses of academia and life on the Smith campus. Contributions to the periodical were anonymous, though the contributors were listed in the front of the magazine. In her 1952 calendar, held by the Lilly Library, Indiana University at Bloomington, Plath has three reminders on 3, 7, and 14 May 1952. On the 3rd she worked on writing her piece; on the 7th...

First of all, Happy New Year. In 2013, I kept track of many of the articles published about Sylvia Plath on a special page of this blog. I never intended to see it last the whole year, but it did and proved to be one of the more popularly hit pages. However, the 50th anniversaries of so much ( The Bell Jar  & Plath's death) are now over. I did not want to just delete the data, so here it is in full in its own blog post! All links were accessed and valid on the date of the article published. This page is temporary, but will compile online articles and links that appear surrounding the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, as well as articles about the 50th anniversary of her death.  Additional articles that appear on publications such as Carl Rollyson's biography American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath (St. Martin's Press), Andrew Wilson's Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted (Simon & Schuster),...