Christie's New York had an online auction that ended Friday, 17 September 2021, of a nice looking copy of the 1963 Heinemann edition The Bell Jar with Victoria Lucas as author.   In the auction of "The Exceptional Literature Collection of Theodore B. Baum: Part Two, the copy was Lot 355 . Theodore B. Baum (1935-    ) is an American cable television company executive. The details from the auction are: "First edition of Plath's thinly veiled autobiography published in England pseudonymously a month before her February 1963 death. Plath had returned to London with her two young children during the brutally cold winter of 1962, renting a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road (an address once inhabited by William Butler Yeats). Though that autumn had been a period of intense activity as she produced the poems that would comprise Ariel , depression nonetheless overtook her. The Bell Jar , her only novel, did not appear under her own name until 1967 and, in accordance with the wishes of...

In addition to a typescript copy of Sylvia Plath's Circus in Three Rings that she compiled in Spring 1955 as she was preparing to graduate from Smith College, the Lilly Library of Indiana University, Bloomington, has a typescript copy of Plath's The Colossus and other poems in Box 8, Folder 8, that she submitted, like other collections, to the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Plath considered marketing a book to the Yale Series of Younger Poets starting in 1955, around the time she assembled her Circus in Three Rings . Also, she intended to send something to them in June 1956. Whether these first two happened or not I am not sure. Plath did submit Two Lovers and a Beachcomber on 16 February 1957 (rejected 8 August 1957) and The Bull of Bendylaw and other Poems circa late February or early March 1959 (rejected 6 June 1959). If she missed 1958 who can really be surprised because of her teaching workload. Plath appears to have submitted the Colossus manuscript to the Yale S...

The Bell Jar , published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, received mixed reviews when it was published on 14 January 1963. Within a month after Plath's death, Ted Hughes gave Heinemann permission to publicly release Plath's name as the author. That did not stop Heinemann from releasing a book club edition of Victoria Lucas's The Bell Jar under the Contemporary Fiction imprint in 1964. Strangely, though, on the back of that dust wrapper it reads, "Victoria Lucas is a pseudonym, and we are not in a position to disclose any details of the author's identity." Do you know what's on the inside flap of the dust wrapper of the first, Heinemann edition (pictured left)? "Esther Greenwood's story began before her visit to New York, but it was during those strangely unreal weeks - when with eleven other winners of a fashion magazine contest, she was offered the riches of the city as a gift - that her growing feeling of unease an inadequacy began to op...

A couple of years ago, I learned and reported that the first edition print run for a Victoria Lucas Bell Jar  (Heinemann, 1963, pictured right) was 2,000. This is an interesting number to know because it helps us recognize the scarcity of Plath's novel. The number was described in Stephen Tabor's incomparable  Sylvia Plath: An Annotated Bibliography as a "token quantity". Recently I learned from a bookseller in England, Giles Bird O.B.E. of BAS Ltd. in London, that the first printing of Plath's 1960 volume of poetry The Colossus was a number far less than that of The Bell Jar . (He in turn, it should be said, was provided with the figure by the amazing Jean Rose, an archivist at Random House Group UK which holds Heinemann's archives.) Anyone want to take a guess as to the number? My first reaction was shock. However, shock might have been a premature evaluation. After all, Heinemann was not normally a publisher of poetry. And in light of the fact that t...

The William Heinemann Ltd archives, which are a part of Random House Group UK, hold materials by and relating to Sylvia Plath. Included among the documents are letters to, from, and about Plath, her book contracts ( The Colossus , 1960, and The Bell Jar , 1963). This post looks at the Heinemann archive materials both in the Random House Group UK archive and documents that are held in the Sylvia Plath Collection at Smith College. The bar at the York Minster Pub (now The French House), in March 2013 Plath signed her Heinemann contract for The Colossus on 10 February 1960 at the York Minster Pub (now The French House) at 49 Dean Street, Soho, London ( map ). She wrote proudly about the experience in a letter jointly addressed to her mother and brother the following day, 11 February: "picture (yesterday) your daughter/sister ... of enormous & impressive size, sailing into the notorious York Minster pub on Dean Street in Soho, just off Shaftesbury Avenue, about 12:15 & ...

On 19 June 2013, Bonhams (Kensington, London) will auction in lot 202 a rare, uncorrected proof copy of The Bell Jar by Victoria Lucas (Sylvia Plath). Printed in 1962 in an unknown, but limited number of copies, the uncorrected proof of The Bell Jar is the pièce de résistance and also the holy grail of books for a Plath collector. For that matter, one might also want to include the uncorrected proof of The Colossus (1960), too. These books are most desirable, as in possessing more intrinsic--as well as monetary--value as they were printed during Plath's lifetime. The catalog entry for the auction reads: The Bell Jar by Victoria Lucas, UNCORRECTED PROOF COPY, publisher's wrappers, lettered "(Not for Sale) Uncorrected Proof Copy" on upper cover, light spotting, slight wear at extremities of spine, 8vo, Heinemann, 1962 Estimate: £2,000 - 4,000; €2,300 - 4,700; US$ 3,000 - 6,000 Footnotes "AND HOW ARE YOU FEELING THIS MORNING, MISS LUCAS?" Uncorr...

Fifty years ago today, 14 January 1963, The Bell Jar by Victoria Lucas (Sylvia Plath) was published. The creation of and publication history of the novel is one of the more fascinating aspects of Plath scholarship. The secretive nature in which it was written - undated, the exact start and completion date are still unknown as of right now- as well as the process by which Plath saw it accepted and published, change the way in which we might consider Plath as a business woman. In fact, the process by which she saw all of her work come to print is something like leaves me feeling envy and awe: certainly not the image of your 1970s neurotic Sylvia Plath. Plath did tell some of her friends and colleagues that she was writing a novel, but was very reticent to divulge too many details. One of the earliest references - if not the earliest - appears in a letter to Ann and Leo Goodman dated 27 April 1961, in which Plath writes she is more than a third of the way through a novel on the subject...

This is late news, but... While many of us were fresh off of participating in the Sylvia Plath 75th Year Symposium at Oxford last fall, James Michie, Plath's editor at Heinemann, passed away. The Guardian's obituary is here . Michie was responsible for seeing The Colossus and The Bell Jar in print.