It is nearly the end of day two here and I am still kind of processing what I saw on day one. This morning, for example, I read the letters from Assia Wevill to Mrs. Plath over coffee before the library opened and I am still not recovered. One of the items I was most excited to see is in Folder 1 of Box 14, Plath's personal papers. In this folder were sihlouettes dating from 1946 and 1956. The 1956 one was my focus as I remember all the time about Plath's writing about it in her journals. She did so on 30 March 1956 when she was pining for Richard Sassoon, enamoured of Ted Hughes, but spending a lot of time with Tony in advance of meeting up with Gordon! She wrote: 'Tony and I walked about and looked at paintings until a small man asked if he could cut my silouhette "comme un cadeau", so I stood in the middle of the square in the middle of Montmartre and gazed at the brilliant restaurants in the middle of a gathering crowd which ohed and ahed and which was just wh...

Sylvia Plath was in Paris five times in one calendar year. More specifically, she visited Paris five times from December 1955 to August 1956, that's within nine months. Her first stay was from 20 December to 31 December 1955.  She touched her feet in Paris again upon her return from Nice and the south of France on 8-9 January 1956.  Plath was in Paris for another long stretch from 24 March to 6 April 1956, leaving on the 6th to go from Paris through Strasbourg and then into Kehl, Germany, and onward to Munich, with Gordon Lameyer.  Then she spent the first portion of her honeymoon in Paris with her husband (and mother) from 22 June to 5 July. On her way back from Spain to England, she and Hughes stopped once more in Paris on 23 August until the 28th, this time without Plath's mother, though they were joined by Warren Plath.  Recently I was in Europe and had the opportunity to layover briefly in Paris, so I maximized the opportunity to do something I had never done be...

Susan O'Neill-Roe took a series of photographs of Sylvia Plath and her children from October to late November (or maybe early December) 1962 while she was a day nanny/mother's help at Court Green. From nearby Belstone , it was a short drive to North Tawton and the aid she provided enabled Plath to complete the masterful October and November poems and also to make day or overnight trips to London for poetry business and other business.  Some of O'Neill-Roe's photographs are well-known.  However, a cache of photographs formed a part of the papers of failed biographer Harriet Rosenstein. They were sold separately from the rest of her papers that went to Emory. I was fortunate enough to see low resolution scans of them a while back so please note these are being posted today as mere reference quality images.  There are two series here. The first of the children with Plath dressed in red and black. (This should be referred to in the future, please, as Plath's  Stendhal-c...

Sometimes your breath is taken away. Sometimes you wish you were filthy rich. Sometimes these things happen at the very same moment. Yesterday, a rare photograph of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes taken by James Coyne in 1958 was made available on the market by James Cummins Bookseller in New York City . Priced at $25,000, the photograph includes a note from Plath to her in-laws Edith and William Hughes.    Several other images of Plath and Hughes from this session are well known. One was included as is mentioned by Plath and in Cummins' description in the article "Four Young Poets" in  January 1959 issue of Mademoiselle .  Cummins also has for sale a copy of the limited edition Trois Poèmes Inédits , which has been featured on this blog before. I thought I wrote more than what I did and more recently. But, clearly I am mistaken. All links accessed 26 April 2022. If you benefited from this post or any content on the Sylvia Plath Info Blog, my website for Sylvia Plath ( ...

Earlier this year in May, I did a blog post on a reversed photograph  of Sylvia Plath that was printed in the Cambridge newspaper Varsity . In that post, I alluded to having found another one. Well, here you go. This one appeared first in Bitter Fame . This is the photograph that appeared in the book... Plath was right handed and like most righties, she wore her watch on her left hand. (Though there are some freaks out there, such as myself, who are right-handed and wear their watch on their right wrist!) But in the image above you can see the watch appears on her "right" wrist.  Below the photograph has been flipped horizontally. Now the watch appears on her left wrist and the squirmy-looking baby Frieda Hughes is primarily nestled in her right arm, her baby-bum supported by Plath's probably stronger hand, the right one.  The first post on reversed images, Parting Ways with Sylvia Plath , appeared in 2013. I hope that you find these posts useful, helpful, and interesting...

In previous years, I have created item-level catalogues for some of Sylvia Plath's scrapbooks (and one of Ted Hughes). I am happy to say that I am in the position to provide a page by page, photograph by photograph description of the Hughes Family Album assembled by Sylvia Plath between [1956] and 1962 that sold recently at Sotheby's.  No, I did not buy it. I wish! Rather, I was able to work with photographs of all the pages. The previous catalogs are as follows: High School scrapbook (Lilly Library) Smith College scrapbook (Lilly Library) Ted Hughes publications scrapbook (Emory University) In addition to these above, Plath maintained, with less enthusiasm I think, a publications clipping scrapbook which is held by Smith College. However, the volume was disassembled and by that I mean individual clipped publications have been removed to folders for each respective work (the paper of the scrapbooks is very acidic, and the tape used was, of course, bad...Basic tape and archi...