If you have about 50 minutes of time, and we all do, so do not think you do not, please give The Scholar’s Armchair #3 a watch.  The title of the programe is " Female Identities: Plath, Magazines, and Food " and it's a conversation between Dr. John Burton and Professor Caroline Smith on her work with Plath, food magazines, and much more.  Caroline Smith is the author of Season to Taste: Rewriting Kitchen Space in Contemporary Women’s Food Memoirs ( University Press of Mississippi, 2023 ) and  Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit ( Routledge, 2007 ). All links accessed: 16 March 2026

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 the Spring 2026 catalog of new books issued by Faber , they are showing a cover design for the highly anticipated volume of The Poems of Sylvia Plath  edited by Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil. See page 46 for more details. Faber is releasing the paperback version of The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath  edited by me (aka Peter K. Steinberg) along with new editions of The Bell Jar  (page 26) and Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (page 26). The catalog text reads:  The definitive edition of Plath’s poetry for readers, scholars and students. Sylvia Plath’s first Collected Poems was published in 1981. This new volume draws on decades of research and almost doubles the content of that previous edition. The book is in two parts. It begins with the poems Plath composed in the last ten years of her life and on which her reputation is founded, and follows with those poems written in childhood and through her student years. In both sections the editors date, correct a...

It is time for HarperCollins to reset and reissue Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar . (Faber needs to do this too though for different reasons .) Get rid of the Foreword by Frances McCullough and eradicate the "Biographical Note" by Lois Ames. Let Plath's novel stand on its own and speak for itself. McCullough's piece is fine and interesting, but the 25th anniversary edition is even nearly 30 years old at this point; and Ames' "contribution" has festered with biographical and factual inaccuracies for more than 53 years.  There are a number of textual problems with the US edition to begin with, as I explored in an essay written in 2012 . But the Biographical Note by the late Lois Ames is in the cross hairs of my ire today. Page numbers here refer to the 1971 edition of the book. On page 282 there are two gaffs that that are shameful. The first is the statement that Plath won the Mademoiselle short fiction contest in August 1951. In fact, she won it in June...

For the Arvon course on Sylvia Plath's Prose that I co-taught with Heather Clark in June 2023 in Yorkshire , I re-read The Bell Jar  making note of the events Esther Greenwood experiences that source back to something lived by Sylvia Plath. For example, we know Plath resided at the Barbizon, which she morphed into the Amazon in the novel. The aim here was to develop, as it was, a "key" to The Bell Jar .  This key as structured right now has three columns. The first column is the scene from the novel--a word, a phrase, a sentence, etc. The second column is the chapter and page number for reference, using the first Heinemann edition (a photocopy of it!). The third column, then, is information about the source: a reference to a letter, a journal, or some other "thing" (that's a technical term) that came out of a direct experience Sylvia Plath had.  This project is something that I had long wanted to do and it helped me develop how I would present the novel to t...

It is an immense honor to have been asked to teach on Sylvia Plath at the Ted Hughes Arvon Centre,  Lumb Bank, located in Heptonstall, England, in June 2023. The Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes Summer School course runs from the 18th to the 24th of June 2023, and I will be joining Heather Clark and Steve Ely, among others.  Together, we will explore the work of Sylvia Plath (and Ted Hughes) in Hughes's Yorkshire home. My own classes will focus on Plath's prose, specifically The Bell Jar . Timing is everything as I had to re-buy a copy of the novel after I sold all my books to Utica last June!    Spaces at the summer school are limited, so if you are interested in the course, please do register . I am very much looking forward to and am grateful beyond expression for this opportunity. And, I am looking forward both to meeting new people and seeing old friends.    All links accessed 11 December 2022.

This Autumn, Faber and Faber are issuing an edition of The Bell Jar illustrated by Beya Rebaï.  In their Autumn 2022 catalog, a draft of the cover was featured:  To be published on 6 October 2022, the book's ISBN is 9780571373079. The hardback price is £14.99. It will be 256pp. Available for pre-order on Amazon.co.uk . All links accessed 25 June 2022.

Azalea Path is one of the more famous "addresses" in the life and oeuvre of Sylvia Plath and it does not house a house at all. Rather, it is the cemetery avenue in which her father, Otto Emil Plath, was laid to rest. Otto Plath immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1900 at the age of 15 years old. He settled eventually in Massachusetts, marrying his wife Aurelia Schober Plath, in January 1932. After the birth of a daughter, Sylvia, in 1932, and a son, Warren, in 1935, the Plaths elected to move. They selected Winthrop, a peninsula just north and east of Boston, strategically as it was the town in which his wife grew up and her parents still lived there. As the 1930s came to a close, Otto Plath's health began to decline. He passed away on November 5, 1940, of an embolism in his lung after being diagnosed with diabetes mellitus and having a gangrenous left leg mostly amputated. His funeral service was held at the Reynolds Funeral Home on November 9 and he w...

LovingSylviaPlath's recent talk at the Sylvia Plath Society's online conference inspired me to do something I swear I thought I would never, ever do. And that is to get a tattoo. Any not just any tattoo: but a Sylvia Plath-inspired tattoo. No, I did not get a $15 Eagle to pay homage to one of my favorite short stories. That might have been too predictable. No, I decided to honor Plath's longer prose, The Bell Jar , and get a tattoo of a turkey neck and turkey gizzards. Buddy, the most complete and fully realized character in the novel, and the one for whom we, as readers, develop the most sympathy and compassion, is a worthy fictional character to immortalize in ink. In addition, I decided to have it captioned "Poems are dust" in Olde English script, because I'm kind of classic like that. The total cost was $401. Not bad. And my doctor said the tetanus I got from it will clear up in a few months.   Editing a recent project Close-up Founded twelve years ago i...

London's Folio Society has recently published an edition of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar . This edition includes a thoughtful introduction by Heather Clark and six illustrations by Alexandra Levasseur. Details on the book:  Bound in blocked cloth. Set in Verdigris. 248 pages. Frontispiece and 6 colour illustrations (including a double-page spread). Blocked slipcase. 8 ¾" x 5 ½". No apparent ISBN. I particularly like that it is set in Verdigris which is Plathian, as you may recall the line from "Death & Co.": "The nude / Verdigris of the condor." Of course the typeface has nothing to do with condor's coloring as Plath saw it, but just as a word it is a nice association.   The slipcase has a series of rectangle boxes that are designed, I imagine, to reflect the famous Shirley Tucker design for the first Faber edition.    Buy the book ! My copy was delivered swiftly! Faber and Faber will be releasing their own illustrated edition of The Bell J...

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.

In the first paragraph of Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar , Esther Greenwood sets the tone going, like a fat gold watch, for the entire book.  She foreshadows her own experiences with Electroconvulsive therapy later in the book. She has two sets of treatment: the first does nothing to life her depression and launches her into a suicide attempt; the second restores her to health. One of a number of "doubles" themes that runs throughout the novel. But in that first paragraph, Esther places the herself as an information consumer in a hectic world of newspaper headlines: "that's all there was to read about in the paper – goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner..."  So much information has been digitized that I thought it might be interesting, upon my bi-annual reading of the novel, to see if any of these New York City newspapers that Esther (and Plath) saw in June 1953 were available digitally.  There was a lot going on in the world when ...

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...

Hey! I recently received a gift from Anna, the mastermind behind the long-standing Tumblr  Loving Sylvia Plath ! She was generous enough to send me two needed editions of The Bell Jar in translation. The first one is A Redoma de Vidro , Portguese edition, from 2015.  The second book is Szklany klosz , a Polish edition printed in 2019. The parcel was accompanied with four selections of vegan German chocolate. I cannot read either Portuguese or Polish, but I can eat chocolate like an Olympic gold medalist.  My current shelf of Bell Jar translations... Note I've included the French Œuvres and Italian Opere as they include the novel. That's 33 total, though some are duplicated. The books looks great up there on the shelf; the chocolate is long gone. Thank you, Anna!