On 3 June 1953, sixty-nine years ago today, Sylvia Plath was at work as the Guest Managing Editor at 575 Madison Avenue in New York at the offices of Mademoiselle magazine. Plath's calendar, held by the Lilly Library, indicates that her schedule that day was included taking the "Last word pix" in Central Park. The "Last Word" was some text Plath wrote to accompany the photograph of all 20 guest editors in star-shape. Plath is, famously perhaps, at the top of the formation. Janet Wagner is holding Plath's right hand. Carol LeVarn is the blonde on the far left.  The names captioned below follow the star from Plath's right hand counter-clockwise to Plath's left. Anne Shawber (number 9) is the bottom left young woman with her right leg out, and Dinny Lane (number 13) is the bottom right woman with her left leg out. You do the hokey-pokey and you turn yourself around... The far right is Margaret Affleck (17). This photograph was taken at the Bethesda Terr...

Sylvia Plath met Carol LeVarn McCabe in New York City during her June 1953 internship at Mademoiselle magazine. McCabe, who was the inspiration for Doreen in The Bell Jar , recently passed away and you can read her fascinating obituary online . I am grateful to Stephen Monteiro for letting me know. All links accessed 24 February 2022.

There are a fair number of memories of Sylvia Plath in the Rosenstein collection now at Emory that are, for lack of a better way to put it, negative. I may be on an island about this, but I actually like that and appreciate it. I do not think Plath was a saint, and what I take away from these recollections is that she was, simply, complicated. That she made a different impression on different people throughout the course of her life is fine. I am also, possibly, on an island because the general tone of Bitter Fame is Olwynian, and I do not mind that book. For the simple fact that Sylvia Plath had flaws and I believe it is better to know them. In yesterday's post I related two such negative comments on Plath by former housemate Lisa Levy and friend Clarissa Roche. There are a number of negative comments, too, about Plath's parenting (see Leonard Baskin and Nancy Axworthy, among others). In addition to the positive and negative memories that Rosenstein (and others) have reco...

It has been quite some time since a "Sylvia Plath: Did you know…" appeared on this blog so I thought I should remedy this unintended gap. Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar (1963) is a fun book to read for its hidden messages and allusions. Plath carefully and consciously manipulated time and people to construct a work based off of many experiences in her own life, but undoubtedly also added fictional color. One scene in the novel in particular that always makes me chuckle is Esther's motivation for wanting to spend her summer writing a novel. She writes: Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people. (1963:126) After this, Esther drafts a first paragraph, Elaine sat on the breezeway in an old yellow nightgown of her mother's waiting for something to happen. It was a sweltering morning in July, and drops of sweat crawled down her back one by one, like slow insects. I leaned back and read what I had written. I...

In February 1955, Mademoiselle published a special "twentieth anniversary issue". One of the sections of this issue did a year-by-year review of highlights and Sylvia Plath was mentioned as one for 1952. This was the year in which her short story "Sunday at the Mintons'" was published and won first prize in the College Fiction Contest. Mademoiselle , March 1955 We know Plath read this February 1955 issue for two reasons. One is that Cyrilly Abels sent Plath a telegram (held by the Lilly Library) on 1 March 1955 saying "Thanks for your fine words about February and also for the stories". It is possible this is in reference to three stories Plath sent to Abels on 30 January 1955: "The Day Mr. Prescott Died", "Tongues of Stone", and "Superman and Paula Brown's New Snowsuit". The second reason we know Plath read the February 1955 issue is because in their March 1955 issue, Mademoiselle printed Plath's brief acc...

Did you know that in The Bell Jar , Esther Greenwood & her fellow guest editors do not work at/for Ladies’ Day ? The name of the magazine where they did work was never actually named. The most we are told is that, "We had all won a fashion magazine contest...and as prizes they gave us jobs in New York for a month" (1971, 3). And, in the text of the novel, whenever Ladies’ Day is named, it is actually quite clear that the guest editors are visitors there, or that they are visiting a separate location. The first mention of Ladies' Day comes in Chapter Three. From the way Greenwood describes it, Ladies' Day is "the big women's magazine that features lush double-page spreads of Technicolor meals..." (27-28). Then, on page 30, Greenwood says, "None of our magazine editors or the Ladies' Day staff members..." which further illustrates the point. Lastly, when recovering from ptomaine poisoning, "Those dodos on Ladies Day " ...

Sylvia Plath published frequently in Seventeen and Mademoiselle throughout her undergraduate college years. Did you know that both periodicals purchased poems but that these poems appear never to have been printed? Seventeen purchased "Sonnet to a Dissembling Spring" in March 1953. Mademoiselle purchased for "inventory" Plath's poem "Parallax" on 17 November 1954. My suspicion is that Seventeen erroneously purchased "Sonnet to a Dissembling Spring" in March 1953. Plath had a number of poems and stories printed, mostly in the "It's All Yours" section of the periodical. By March 1953, Plath was 20 years old and Seventeen typically only printed poems and stories in "It's All Yours" by those still in their teens. As for "Parallax"... Sylvia Plath won Honorable Mention in Mademoiselle 's first Dylan Thomas Poetry Award in January 1955. It may be that this was her submission... The ...

Today I visited briefly the Schlesinger Library in Cambridge, Mass., to browse through their holdings of the magazines Seventeen and Mademoiselle . I was looking for some information based on notes I took at Indiana last Tuesday on my "Clippings Day". The Lilly holds some letters Plath received from Seventeen about a poem entitled "Cinderella." Being somewhat familiar with Plath's publications, this struck me as strange. So I wanted to look through the years 1952-1954 just to see if something was missed by others (my thought was maybe it was printed late in 1953 when she was recovering at McLean from her nervous breakdown and suicide attempt). I pulled up "Cinderella" on the computer and then it hit me: I'm an idiot. "Cinderella" was published, but under the title "Twelfth Night" in the December 1952. I don't recall seeing any letters (in the places I looked) suggesting or requesting a title change. I hope this wasn'...

Sylvia Plath began working for Mademoiselle prior to the June 1, 1953 start of her guest editorship. On May 26, Plath went to the Cambridge, Massachusetts home of the writer May Sarton. It was there, at 14 Wright Street (pictured), that she interviewed Elizabeth Bowen for a profile in the August issue. For the profile, Plath was photographed with Bowen. The article ran on page 282. The Sylvia Plath Collection at the Mortimer Rare Book Room holds a contact sheet with 11 images of the Plath/Bowen interview (SP-11), as well as one larger print of the image published in Mademoiselle (SP-12). Additionally, the Sylvia Plath Materials at Indiana University contain many of Plath's letters and instructions from Mademoiselle , prior to and during her Guest Editorship. Included with these is a 2 page document of instructions from Jane Mayberry for the interview (Box 12, Folder 7). In the summer of 1954, Plath lived just five-minutes (walking casually but with determination, in sensibl...

In The Bell Jar , most of the Ladies' Day guest interns develop ptomaine poisoning after a luncheon - the culprit being the crabmeat. It is quite a memorable scene and so is the recovery. Whilst convalescing, the girls receive a copy of The Thirty Best Short Stories Stories of the Year to read and one story in particular holds Esther Greenwood's attention. This scene is closely related to actual events that happened in June 1953 while Plath was at Mademoiselle . The guest editors - in real life - came down with ptomaine poisoning on Tuesday June 16, 1953. The story Plath read, contained in the The Best American Short Stories 1953: And the Yearbook of the American Short Story (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), was "The Fugue of the Fig Tree" by Stanley Sultan. Did you know that Plath was later on faculty at Smith College with Stanley Sultan (academic year 1958-1959)? To my surprise (somewhat) and disappointment (somewhat), her journal entries about him neither me...

On June 19, 1953, Sylvia Plath was in New York City working as Guest Managing Editor for Mademoiselle magazine. This was a crucial experience for her, one in which she relived - to a certain degree - in The Bell Jar . The Bell Jar , in the absence of substantial journal entries, provides us with some insight into Plath's experiences and conversations during this month (see also a couple of letters in Letters Home ). The novel memorably begins, "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs..." Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were killed, by electric chair, on June 19, 1953, 56 years ago today. It was major news making event, as Esther Greenwood relates in the novels second sentence, "The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers -- goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner..." The day of the execution, Plath typed a journal fragment (likely while working). S...