A month ago I was in England and took this video of the churchyard of St. Peter's in North Tawton and of Court Green. I apologize for the awful video quality; the settings on my camera were not set very high unfortunately. As the video progresses, I walk towards the "wall of old corpses" ("Letter in November") -- (also known as "a row of headstones" ("The Moon and the Yew Tree") -- and get a shot of Court Green, with daffodils abloom. And here are two photographs of Court Green, taken with appropriate camera settings...

The archive today was fun. Karen Kukil had Plath's Royal typewriter out for someone else to photograph, so she and I started typing on it. We were comparing the way it typed against some of the documents Plath created on it, circa 1953 when she obtained it. Plath was quite proficient and efficient on the typewriter...I am not. In the process of working with it, I typed the first sentence from Plath's 19 June 1953 journal fragment, which was typed in New York City during her guest editorship at Mademoiselle . It is probable that Plath typed that fragment while at the offices of Mademoiselle, but it could be that it was typed in her hotel room (room 1511) at the Barbizon Hotel. This line I typed was "All right, so the headlines blare that the two of them..." (see Appendix 4, page 541 of The Unabridged Journals ). The video. For the rest of the morning I worked with Plath's personal papers, including her address book, her 1962 Calendar, and other items. I had loo...

When Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes moved to Court Green in September 1961, they had abundant living space for the first time in their married lives. Each even got a room to serve as a study. In a 15 September 1961 letter to her mother, Plath writes about settling in Court Green and that her brother Warren “has been really a wonderful part of the family “ (429). While he was there, Warren Plath assisted in “sanding an immense elm plank which will make me my first real capacious writing table” (429). Over the next 14 months, Plath would probably write all her new poems and stories on this elm plank. And probably also typed letters home and made entries in her journals. That elm wood desk was part of Plath’s estate sale that, in 1981, would go to the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College. How wonderful and coincidental that Plath lived on Elmwood Road! To celebrate this piece of elm wood and the works composed on it, here is a badly shot video. It hangs in the offices of the Mortimer...

This video captures a scene from Chapter 11 of The Bell Jar . In the scene, Esther Greenwood sits on a bench in Boston Public Garden. 

This is the first Sylvia Plath Info video post. In April, I visited the Mortimer Rare Book Room and took this (poor quality) video of Plath's library. There are two parts. Stay tuned for more video posts in the future, I think. Part 1 Part 2 Sorry both go a bit sideways...