The archival finding aid is many things. It is a textual map.  It serves as a basic outline of a collection. It is also a key. It provides information, sometimes minute (item level) and sometimes very broad and general.  The Plath mss II finding aid is a wonderful document which was created by the Lilly Library in 1977, the year of the collection's acquisition from Aurelia Schober Plath. It has been online for as long as I can remember and may be one of my most frequented web pages.  When I was rummaging... I mean... when I was on my recent very serious research trip which helped to put the finishing touches on my current book project (the final manuscript of which was submitted recently), I went through boxes 8-15 methodically, folder by folder, and for the most part page by page. I spent the most time in boxes 13 through 15, perhaps, for no other reason than it was material with which I barely spent much time reading on previous research trips.  In box 13, folders...

Sylvia Plath lived at 55 Eltisley Avenue, Cambridge from approximately 7 December 1956 to 5 June 1957 when, on that day, they left Cambridge to convalesce in Heptonstall prior to sailing to the US. Ted Hughes lived there slightly longer as Plath was tied to Whitstead for the fall term.  Plath wrote to her mother, "On Dec. 7th a new life will begin" ( Letters V2 , 17). She wrote that at their new address they had a "livingroom, bedroom, kitchen & pantry" ( Letters V2 , 12).  To Marcia (then Plumer) Stern, she detailed that the living room was painted a pale blue and was furnished with a "dingy blue sofa, yellow lampshades & pillows, dark brown woodwork & furniture" ( Letters V2 , 37). She continued: "We painted myriads of fire bricks to match the walls & got good pine boards & built a 5-shelved bookcase 6 & ½ feet long, on which our growing book collection is stocked---very fine, our one wealth" ( Letters V2 , 37). When Pla...

On 19 February 1956, 65 years ago today, Sylvia Plath was in Whitstead at Cambridge writing in her journal. It was a Sunday night. That day she had walked to Grantchester with Christopher Levenson, the skies were gray and the landscape white but visible were browns and greens of the earth. She met John Lythgoe for tea and she read in Macbeth . These details are from her pocket calendar. Her simultaneously kept desk calendar, which tracked her academic doings, indicated she was with Chris from 10 to 1 and John from 2 to 7. It details that she finished reading O'Neill and read Ronsard, Webster, and Euripides in addition to Macbeth.  She wrote one letter that day, to Jon Rosenthal.  Her journal, written that night, details quite a bit more. It started out almost as a letter: "To whom it may concern: Every now and then there comes a time when the neutral and impersonal forces of the world turn and come together in a thunder-crack of judgment." And she went on to say: Today my...

The following is a guest blog post by Di Beddow, who is currently researching "The Cambridge of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath" at Queen Mary University London, on a recently found collection of papers by and about Sylvia Plath. Thank you, Di! ~pks Cambridge can be cruel in the Winter as Sylvia Plath tells us in her letter of January 1956: "the atrocious food, the damp cold & the unsimpatico people" ( Letters Vol I , 1080). During the worst of times then, meeting up with the archivist at Newnham College recently (we became friends after finding much in common after my first visit to the archive) she told me that because of building work that had taken place at the college, she had uncovered a file which might cheer me a little. As luck would have it, Anne Thomson found the file of alumna, Sylvia Plath, who had attended the college as a Fulbright student from October 1955 to June 1957. Anne read through the file and appreciating that it contained very personal inf...

Sylvia Plath's long short story "Stone Boy With Dolphin", written around 1957/58, is considered to be a novel-fragment. The Lilly Library, Mortimer Rare Book Room, and Emory University each hold manuscript versions of this story. Indiana also holds a short story called "The Bronze Boy" (mss. II, Box 7, f.8; Plath mss. II, in SP to ASP, Oct. 8, 1951) but I am unsure if this is a related story. The story, set in Cambridge, fictionalizes her meeting with Ted Hughes and draws heavily on real events. Additionally, Plath captured some scenes directly from her journals. The following is from her journal, dated 19 February, 1956, "I went to the bronze boy whom I love, partly because no one really cares for him, and brushed a clot of snow from his delicate smiling face. He stoodthere in the moonlight, dark, with snow etching his limbs in white, in the semicircle Below is the text from the story: "Ever since the start of Lent term she had taken to brushing snow ...