The first half of 2021 is in the rear view mirror. Sylvia Plath featured in every day for me, and maybe for you. In April and May, in the US and in the UK, respectively, readers were treated to the publication of Three-Martini Afternoons: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton ( publisher's website ). A  new edition  of Plath's poems is in the works for a 2024(ish) publication with Faber and Faber in London. Heather Clark's massive, commendable Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath was shortlisted for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. This is a phenomenal accomplishment and recognition for Clark's tome ( publisher's website ). Congratulations, Heather. Red Comet is a remarkable achievement. Paulina Bren published a biography of The Barbizon Hotel ( publisher's website ). Plath features a little bit in it, I am told. On  14 June, Janet Malcolm , author of The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes , passed away. Here and there I was worki...

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...

Gail Crowther and I are happy to announce that we will be giving our second live public reading from our book These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath . The event will be on Zoom on Saturday, 9 May 2020, at 10 am EDT/3 pm GMT. The first five essays in These Ghostly Archives  ( Amazon ) are written conversations about our experience of researching Sylvia Plath and her archive. They were composed textually, completely, with us emailing back and forth documents and responding to what was said. This reading provides an opportunity to hear our Sylvia Plath conversations in our own voices. Registration will be required for the event. Please click here register . All links accessed 27 April 2020.

Something I heard from people was that they wished they could have attended some of the talks on editing The Letters of Sylvia Plath  from the Belfast symposium and or at some of the other events I was lucky enough to give it. I recently joined Zoom and would like to offer anyone the opportunity to join in on a reading of my paper.  So please join me on Saturday, 25 April 2020, at 10 am Eastern Time US . My talk should run about 25-28 minutes. I will try to answer questions if some are presented in the chat feature, or, also, on Twitter @sylviaplathinfo ! I plan to give the very same talk for those on the other side of the clock, as it were, in places such as New Zealand, Australia, Asia, and the like. Please bear with me if there are any technical glitches. This is a trial run for two additional events: 1. A reading from These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath  that Gail Crowther and I plan to do on 9 May. 2. Gail Crowther and I are ...

There are a lot of files to go through which is great because what else can you really do that feels productive in the middle of the winter? One page per image; and I think Emily has been sending between 200 and 250 per day. Each set starts with a photograph of the the folder so that I know where the files start and end. It helps organize things and gives a real feel for the collection. And then the only other request I had to was to ensure that all edges of the page be visible. I do not know why I crave this, but I do. I suspect I have read about half of what has been sent. It takes me a while to read it... Most recently I read the big Macedo  folder and the moderately sized Roche one. I am rather enamored with the Roches as a result. They interviewed really well. Clarissa famously was featured in the video on Plath in the 1988 PBS  Voices & Visions series but this was the first time I recall reading anything by Paul Roche on Plath. One thing I particularly enjoyed in...

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...

This is a blog post I started several years ago (in 2013!!!) but never posted for a variety of reasons. Today seems like a good day to publish it… In the morning before a Sylvia Plath archives talk Gail Crowther and I gave at Plymouth University in England---please see the  March 2013 Blog archive  for a bit about that presentation.---Gail and I did a bit of Plathing in the villages of Belstone and Corscombe in Devon. Belstone is were Susan O'Neil-Roe lived at "Pear Trees" cottage. (For more on Belstone and "Pear Trees" please click here .) It took two trips to the village to find the house, but thanks to the marvel that is Google we were able to locate the house . From there, we went onto to nearby Corscombe, where was Plath took horse riding lessons on an older, docile horse called Ariel. Being there, the poems "Ariel" and "Sheep in Fog" take on a whole new meaning, as does her December 1962 introductions that she wrote about the poems....

Gail Crowther and I recently teamed up for a These Ghostly Archives -inspired archival research trip and thought we would share it with you. PKS: The University of Glasgow has some Sylvia Plath archival material. In October 2018, a blog post entitled Philip Hobsbaum (1932-2005): Ghosts in the archive – Sylvia Plath was published about the Philip Hobsbaum papers that are in the process of being catalogued. GC: Philip Hobsbaum (1932 - 2005) was a teacher, poet, and critic, and a contemporary of Ted Hughes’ at Cambridge where they were both interested in the oral power of poetry. It was here that Hobsbaum worked as the editor of delta , a small poetry magazine published by the University of Cambridge throughout the 1950s and 60s. After moving to London in 1955, Hobsbaum was instrumental in setting up The Group which was a regular meeting for poets and writers to share ideas and work. In the 1950s and 60s much of literary London would attend The Group, including Ted Hughes, David...

Bonhams London will offer at auction some property formerly belonging to Elizabeth Sigmund, Sylvia Plath's friend and co-dedicatee of The Bell Jar .  The auction is part of the Fine Books and Manuscript auction (25355) in London  (Knightsbridge) on 26 June 2019. Links and images to the respective lots will be added when available. All text below gratefully provided from the auction catalogue by Luke Batterham, Senior Valuer at Bonhams. LOT 238 • (24869413/1) PLATH (SYLVIA) THOMAS (DYLAN) The Collected Poems, SYLVIA PLATH'S COPY, ANNOTATED IN FIVE PLACES AND EXTENSIVELY UNDERLINED, with upwards of seventy sentences or passages underscored, marked or bracketed in the margins, in two places with Plath's distinctive "star" symbol in black ink, 13 poems in the Contents marked, photographic frontispiece, publisher's blue cloth, worn, spine soiled and split, 8vo , New York, A New Directions Book [by James Laughlin], [1953] £3,000 - 5,000 €3,400 - 5,700 ...