After leaving the Beinecke yesterday, I thought it might be poetic, or perhaps even prosaic, to talk a short walk up Prospect Street. Plath stayed at 238 Prospect Street and writes about it in The Bell Jar . During Esther Greenwood's visit to Buddy Willard, they "walked very slowly" in "the cold, black, three o'clock wind" from downtown New Haven "to the house where I was sleeping in the living-room on a couch that was too short because it only cost fifty cents a night instead of two dollars like most of the other places with proper beds" (1963, 63). It was dark when I got there as the library closed after sunset. This house is directly opposite Yale's chemistry facilities, and so you can imagine I wanted to go all the way, just like Buddy wanted to and visit the chemistry lab. It was, of course, famoulsy behind the Chemistry Lab where Buddy first kissed Esther Greenwood, chapped lips and all. There has been appreciable construction since I was...

In my previous trip to the Lilly Library in March 2015, where much of the research went into T he Letters of Sylvia Plath , I skimmed the surface of the typescript pages for Aurelia Schober Plath's Letters Home . In it were located copies of two letters that Sylvia Plath sent to Margaret Cantor, her employer for the second half of the summer of 1952. But an exhaustive search through the typescripts could not be undertaken due to more pressing research needs. Finding two letters was wonderful, and I knowingly passed on the chance to look page by page for any other letters.  On Monday and Tuesday of this week I did do such a chore. And it was a chore but it did provide a nice break from standing up and from taking photographs. The paper is ludicrously thin and hard to handle. It also does not stack nicely and neatly, which is frustrating to someone like me who prefers things orderly and squared. The paper is largely either pink in color, or green. Transcriptions of the letters to War...

On Sunday 2 March 1958, Sylvia Plath wrote a letter to . . . her mother! I know! #Shocking. Wholly omitted from Letters Home  but available to read at the Lilly Library, the typed letter was written on the now famous pink Smith College Memorandum paper. Among other things, Plath writes that the night before --1 March-- was spent lazily seeing two films: one on Goya and another on a documentary on a bullfighter. The film on Spanish painter Francisco De Goya ( info ) was The Glory of Goya  (1950) and featured music by Andres Segovia, a musician Plath saw perform at Smith College as an undergraduate on 10 April 1954. The documentary on the bullfighter was the 1956 Mexican film Torero!  ( YouTube ) about the Mexican bullfighter Luis Procuna ( info ). The film on Goya is interesting as within three weeks Plath was on Spring Break, writing nearly a poem a day and all largely influenced by art, specifically modern art. Also this creative outbreak was inspired by ...

In a letter to her mother dated 24 June 1960 and excerpted in Letters Home , Sylvia Plath wrote about attending a cocktail party for W.H. Auden "last night" at Faber and Faber's (then located at 24 Russell Square ( map ). On this occasion, Plath witnessed Hughes being photographed with T.S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and W. H. Auden . After the party, she said: "Then we went to the Institute of Contemporary Arts and read our poems to an audience of about 25-30 young people with another poet (or, rather, non-poet; very dull)" (386). I was curious about this poetry reading, about who the "dull" "non-poet" was, and so searched to see if the Institute of Contemporary Arts had an archive anywhere. I started at the ICA website and then learned that the records for the period covering Plath's lifetime are held in the Tate Museum archives . The ICA London is among the Tate's list of all archival collections ( TGA 955 ) and ...

This is a third blog post on articles authored by (or possibly/probably authored by) Sylvia Plath. The first blog post was posted on 20 May 2014 . The second was posted on 8 June 2014 . This post discusses articles published or referenced to in letters from events Plath covered for Press Board in March, April, and May 1952. In her sophomore year, Plath was active on the Smith College Press Board. Her letters home refer repeatedly to events she was covering. This presents us with tantalizing possibilities to either uncover original Press Board typescripts in the Smith College Archives, or anonymous articles as they appeared in newspapers in Northampton and Springfield, Massachusetts. In addition to her letters, Plath's calendars at the Lilly Library are perhaps the richest sources for biographical information of her college years. The calendars record particularly her activities with regard to campus events, classes, dates for tests and papers, dates with boys, social engagements...

Sylvia Plath was very active on Smith College Press Board in the academic year of 1952-1953. In March 2012, this blog listed many of the articles known to have been written by Plath, though largely were printed without a byline. In a letter wholly omitted from Letters Home which Plath wrote on 18 May 1953, she writes her mother that recently she had three articles printed in local papers: two in the Daily Hampshire Gazette with a byline and one, a review, appeared anonymously in the Springfield Union . Two of these three articles are listed in Stephen Tabor's excellent Sylvia Plath: An Annotated Bibliography . That means one was omitted, presumably because its existence was not evident. In the first of the articles, and one of the two included in Tabor's bibliography, Plath writes that the Springfield Union piece was a review of the recent Smith College production of Ring Round the Moon , written by Jean Anouilh and adapted by Christopher Fry. This article "Smith ...

On 24 February 1951, Sylvia Plath wrote a postcard home to her mother from Haven House at Smith College about seeing a cartoon about her posted on the community bulletin board in College Hall. She wrote: ... A senior said to me at lunch, 'Congrats for being up on the College Hall Bulletin Board again.' (Smith girls in the news, you know.) So, full of curiosity, I hurried over. [...] I stood for a full five minutes laughing. It was one of those cartoon and personality write-ups titled 'Teen Triumphs.' There was a sketch of a girl s'posed to be me--writing, also a cow [...] All this effusive stuff appeared in the Peoria, Illinois, Star on January 23. Beats me where they got the sea stuff. I just laughed and laughed." ( Letters Home , 66-67, please note the date assigned in Letters Home , 25 February 1951, is the postmark date. The letter is dated by Plath  "Saturday", which was the 24th that year.) The text from the cartoon reads: BORN TO WRITE...

While at the Lilly Library in October doing research before the Sylvia Plath 2012 Symposium, one of the folders in Plath mss II that I wanted to look at contained Plath's letters from 1963. For the several times that I had been out there, I really had not spent much time at all with her correspondence, which is a great embarrassment and a regret, especially because I know the letters that were published in Letters Home are heavily edited and often do not bare any likeness to the original! The letters are organized in rough chronological order... Rough because some researchers working with these papers lamentably get careless and as a result the letters can be out of order... Anyway, while working my way through those letters, I encountered, inevitably, the letter that Plath sent to her mother dated 4 February 1963 - 50 years ago today. It is the last letter included in Letters Home and other than hearsay -- that Plath wrote her mother a letter the night before she took her life...

In the fall of 1955, in her first term as a graduate student at Newnham College, Cambridge University, Sylvia Plath played the role of Alice in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1614), produced by the Amateur Dramatics Club in Cambridge from November 24-December 3, 1955. Alice's role is "mistress o' the game." The role has just a five lines (and a fight!). Did you know … what those lines were? They were: "A mischiefe on you, they are such as you are, that undo us, and take our trade from us, with your tuft-taffata haunches."; "The poore common whores can ha'no traffic, for the privy rich ones; your caps and hoods of velvet call away our customers, and lick the fat from us."; "Od's foot, you Bawd in grease, are you talking?"; "Thou Sow of Smithfield, thou!"; "Ay, by the same token, you rid that week, and broke out of the bottom o'the Cart, Night-tub." ( source, with some "corrections"...

Fifty years ago today, Sylvia Plath's The Colossus was published by Alfred A. Knopf in the United States. A small notice of the publication appeared in that day's New York Times , on page 26. On 1 May 1961, a year before publication, Plath headed her letter to her mother, published in Letters Home : "GOOD NEWS GOOD NEWS GOOD NEWS!" (417). Plath admitted, "After all the fiddlings and discouragements from the little publishers, it is an immense joy to have what I consider THE publisher accept my book for America with such enthusiasm. They 'sincerely doubt a better first volume will be published this year.'" (417-418). At the end of the letter Plath tells her mother that "I have been writing seven mornings a week at the Merwins' study and have done better things than ever before, so it is obvious this American acceptance is a great tonic" (418). The poems Plath wrote at this time were "In Plaster," "Tulips," ...

Today was the first day of my research trip at the Lilly Library. I travelled from Boston through Washington DC to Indianapolis by air, and then to Bloomington on the shuttle bus. The total travel time from when I left the house was about 9 hours. It was a beautiful day to fly, the whole eastern seaboard was cloud free: Manhattan and Philadelphia were quite easily spotted. The Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia gave way after a while to a flat, snow cover land. What I focused on today was the correpsondence between 1960 and 1963. Looking for needles in haystacks is never easy and not always rewarding. My reason for spending the day on them is because I am working of a project that must remain ill-defined for now. These letters were at first such a joy to read, but as always after spring 1962 the story takes a turn. Many of the letters are printed in Letters Home , but not all of them. And while the 1982's Journals are quite transparent about edits and omissions, the letters are not....

In Letters Home , Plath wrote to her mother on October 12, 1962, that "I am a famous here--mentioned this week in The Listener as one of the half-dozen women who will last--including Marianne Moore and the Brontës!." Did you know that the article to which she refers was by fellow poet Elizabeth Jennings. It was in Jennings review of Mrs. Browning by Alethea Hatyer? The article appeared in the September 13, 1962 issue of The Listener , on page 400. The paragraph in which Plath's name is mentioned reads, "Mrs Browning labours under the burden which all women poets have to carry - the fact of being a woman. Memorable English or American poets can be numbered on less than two hands; one thinks of Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Edith Sitwell's early work, Anne Ridler, Kathkeen Raine, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and scarcely anyone else..." It must have tickled Plath, particularly, to be mentioned in the same breath as Mari...

The Bell Jar , often considered depressing by those compelled to see Plath's own end and that of the novel as one and the same, contains in its very first chapter, an indication that everything would be alright for Esther Greenwood. At her internship at Ladies Day magazine, she and the other girls were given presents, which they considered "as good as free advertising." (4) These presents - a reminder of a stressful and dark time - were tucked away for a while. "But later, when I was alright again," Esther says, "I brought them out...and last week I cut the plastic starfish off the sunglasses case for the baby to play with." (4) This statement, perhaps more so than the cliff-hanger ending of the novel, guarantee's a 'happy ending' to The Bell Jar . The source of a river or lake is the point origination of the water's flow. For Sylvia Plath, a source for much of her creative writing was her journals. Sylvia Plath's Journals , publis...

Following Laurie's excellent post on the uncorrected proof of Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950-1963 , we decided to see if it would be possible to uncover the mystery of the white-outs she mentions. Carefully holding the book up to the light, I was able to make out two of the three whited-out sections...  Acknowledgments Proof: Page /First edition: Page ix "Of course this book could not exist without the permission given me by Ted and Olwyn Hughes, who have allowed me to publish sections from my daughter's correspondence and have given me the copyright for the selections from her letters."  Proof: Page 426/First edition: Page 483/486 "It is my belief that the last blow may well have been the immediate penetration of her pseudonym 'Victoria Lucas'. She now realized that the fused, caricaturized [sic.] figures in The Bell Jar which bore recognizable idiosyncrasies, were going to be identified. Those who had sacrificed for her, served and lover her were to...

Last night, I updated all the individual works pages on my website for Sylvia Plath , "A celebration, this is". Each page now features bibliographies of reviews that appeared around the time of publication. I wish it were possible to provide links to the articles, but copyright being what it is... Nevertheless, I hope these lists prove useful in reading the very important reviews contemporary to each publication. A note about the page for Plath's Children's Stories. The text there is temporary and unfinished. I should have better content there by Sunday. The webpages are: Ariel (Please see the Poetry Works page) Ariel: The Restored Edition (Please see the Poetry Works page) The Bell Jar (Also in Prose Works ) Children's Stories (Please see the Prose Works page) The Colossus (Please see the Poetry Works page) The Collected Poems (Please see the Poetry Works page) Crossing the Water (Please see the Poetry Works page) The Journals of Sylvi...