This is a second post on recently found articles authored by (or in some instances possibly/probably authored by) Sylvia Plath. The first article was posted on 20 May 2014 . This post presents two new, additional newly found articles authored by Sylvia Plath. On 4 and 5 February 1952, Sylvia Plath attended two lectures on the campus of Smith College for Press Board. The lectures were conducted American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who was at the time professor of Christian ethics at Yale University. She wrote about covering the lecture in letters to her mother dated on 4 February and 6 February. The 6 February letter was included in Letters Home (page 83), but was printed—like many—under the postmark date of 7 February. Plath's calendar for 1952, held by Lilly Library, confirms that she attended the lecture, held in the Browsing Room of the Neilson Library, at 8:00 pm on 4 February; and that she had an "early writeup" due to the Springfield Union by 11 pm. A note o...

This is not naturally something I would expect anyone to know, remember, or commemorate, but ten years ago this month my biography of Sylvia Plath (Chelsea House Publishers, Great Writers series) was published. (Amazon's page claims that it was published in April, but copies were not available until June. It also has a capsule review, still, for the wrong book. #OhWell.) To those who have read it: Thank you! To those who have not, it is available in both hardback and  Kindle editions , and also available  in many libraries around the world , and through some  used book shops . Sylvia Plath formed one sixth of an original series that also includes biographies of Barbara Kingsolver by Linda Wagner-Martin, Kurt Vonnegut by John Tomedi, J.R.R. Tolkien by Neil Heims, Charles Bukowski by Michael Gray Baughan, and Jack Kerouac by Jenn McKee. The series expanded the following year to include books on five gay and lesbian writers: Adrienne Rich by Amy Sickel...

Sylvia Plath was very active on Smith College Press Board in the academic year of 1952-1953. In March 2012, this blog listed many of the articles known to have been written by Plath, though largely were printed without a byline. In a letter wholly omitted from Letters Home which Plath wrote on 18 May 1953, she writes her mother that recently she had three articles printed in local papers: two in the Daily Hampshire Gazette with a byline and one, a review, appeared anonymously in the Springfield Union . Two of these three articles are listed in Stephen Tabor's excellent Sylvia Plath: An Annotated Bibliography . That means one was omitted, presumably because its existence was not evident. In the first of the articles, and one of the two included in Tabor's bibliography, Plath writes that the Springfield Union piece was a review of the recent Smith College production of Ring Round the Moon , written by Jean Anouilh and adapted by Christopher Fry. This article "Smith ...

It is May, but I am thinking about December already… In December 1955, Sylvia Plath spent a large portion of her Christmas holiday from Newnham College and Cambridge, England, in Paris, France. At some point between the 20th and 29th, Plath saw the Emlyn Williams play Someone Waiting , although she saw the French version with the title of Le Monsieur qui attend . She wrote of this in a letter dated 29 December to J. Mallory Wober, who was a student and love interest at King's College, Cambridge, that Plath met and dated in her first fall as a Fulbright scholar. (Wober gave his letters from Plath to King's College in 1988, and I worked with them in February 2004 on a trip to England. Back in June 2007 and February 2008 , I posted on this collection of letters.) And more recently, I learned that Plath also wrote about this play to her mother and Gordon Lameyer in letters dated 30 December 1955 and 21 January 1956, respectively Anyway, I was curious about the play, which Pl...

Sylvia Plath Info Blog turned 7 just a few days ago on April 27, 2014! It is hard for me to fathom, still, that it has carried on this long. I sincerely hope the content is interesting, useful and relevant. Sincere thanks to all who visit, comment, and take something away (and not just in the literal sense of those of you who save every post to your computer hard drive!). Since this blog began, there have been nearly 400,000 page views from people spanning 179 countries and territories. It shows how far reaching interest in Sylvia Plath is and it is an honor to try to contribute to that. I am not sure if anyone on the International Space Station has hit the blog or not. Since that first post in 2007, which I still cringe at -- being quite nervous about what the blog would be like, I and several guest posters have contributed nearly 1,000 individual blog posts! For those who are interested, here are some metrics: The top five pages viewed since this blogs conception are: " ...

A small note in the Journals of Sylvia Plath indicates that the 1962 journals that form Appendix 15 were "arranged thematically by the editor as SP did not indicate a specific order" (703). They date by and large to the period after the birth of Nicholas Farrar Hughes on 17 January 1962 and continue to early July 1962, just after Percy Key's funeral. In this space of time, Plath wrote her long dramatic poem for three voices "Three Women", and a host of other "Ariel"-voice poems such as "Elm", "Little Fugue", "The Rabbit Catcher" and "Berck-Plage" as well as beautiful poems like "Pheasant" and "Among the Narcissi". When reading these journals, you can see the cross-over between the capturing of private experience in her journals and the reshaping of it in the art of her poetry, particularly in "Among the Narcissi" and "Berck-Plage" which both feature Court Green cottage nei...

On pages 56-57 of the Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000), there is an undated entry. Right now reading it, one can only roughly date it to late March/early April 1951. Plath unfortunately (and frustratingly) did not date many of her early journal entries as freshman at Smith College. In this particular entry, Plath has taken "Notes on an experimental film" which was, as Karen V. Kukil points out in her extensive notes to the edition, Un Chien Andalou directed by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí Un Chien Andalou (1929) ( Vimeo , YouTube ) is a sixteen minute silent surrealist short film produced in France by the Spanish director Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí. That semester in the spring of 1951, Plath was taking Art 13. The prior entry to her "Notes on an experimental film" can be dated to late March; and the subsequent entry is her poem "April 18" (untitled in the journal, but it appears under that title in her Collected Poems ). Hard to...