The internet got an interesting story yesterday and today in " Unseen Sylvia Plath letters claim domestic abuse by Ted Hughes " authored by Danuta Kean of The Guardian which saw "Ted Hughes" trending on Twitter. Today, it's "#NationalGrilledCheeseDay". Ms Kean contacted me through a friend and we discussed the sudden presence of the Harriet Rosenstein Sylvia Plath archive which I blogged  about on 10 March  and its disappearance by 18 March. However, Ms Kean uncovered that the archive was removed because of a pending legal concern. Kean's article was instantly picked up by a number of other news sources, and some of the facts from it were even more quickly transformed into complete untruth. The following are articles, listed in no particular order, that I have found on it in varying degrees of veracity. If any new articles appear they will be listed below. Danuta Kean, " Unseen Sylvia Plath letters claim domestic abuse by Ted Hughes...

A rare book recently appeared for sale that is not for the faint of wallet. Offered by Blakeney Griffin Booksellers of London, this copy of the anthology Light Blue, Dark Blue (1960) comes from the Estate of Olwyn Hughes. Some of the particulars from the listing: Publisher: Macdonald, London, 1960. Book Condition: Not Set. First edition, first impression. Original blue cloth, titles to spine in navy blue. With the dust jacket. An excellent copy in the dust jacket. Price: £8,500 Light Blue, Dark Blue is "An Anthology of Recent Writing from Oxford and Cambridge Universities" and was edited by Julian Mitchell & John Fuller for Oxford and William Donaldson & Robin McLaren for Cambridge. "From the library of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath with Plath's inscription to the front free endpaper, 'Ted & Sylvia Hughes London 1960'." "A breath-taking copy of this notable anthology famously printing (besides a poem from Hughes's Hawk ...

The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1 is set to be published by Faber and Faber in England on 5 October 2017. The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2 is scheduled to follow in 2018. Volume 1 of the book will be published in the United States by HarperCollins in hardback on 17 October and in an e-book format (Kindle) a week earlier, on 10 October. This is all good news! As a co-editor of this forthcoming two-volume Letters of Sylvia Plath , and as the moderator of the Sylvia Plath Info Blog, Faber and Faber and the Estate of Sylvia Plath have granted me permission to temporarily post online the letters of Sylvia Plath. Please keep in mind that as this is just a preview, most of the preliminary pages are absent. So, if you click this link, you can see the letters of Sylvia Plath, volume 1 . All links accessed 31 March and 1 April 2017.

In addition to a typescript copy of Sylvia Plath's Circus in Three Rings that she compiled in Spring 1955 as she was preparing to graduate from Smith College, the Lilly Library of Indiana University, Bloomington, has a typescript copy of Plath's The Colossus and other poems in Box 8, Folder 8, that she submitted, like other collections, to the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Plath considered marketing a book to the Yale Series of Younger Poets starting in 1955, around the time she assembled her Circus in Three Rings . Also, she intended to send something to them in June 1956. Whether these first two happened or not I am not sure. Plath did submit Two Lovers and a Beachcomber on 16 February 1957 (rejected 8 August 1957) and The Bull of Bendylaw and other Poems circa late February or early March 1959 (rejected 6 June 1959). If she missed 1958 who can really be surprised because of her teaching workload. Plath appears to have submitted the Colossus manuscript to the Yale S...

Western Massachusetts bookseller, Ken Lopez, is selling a major collection of Sylvia Plath materials. The Harriet Rosenstein Sylvia Plath Archive is listed on his website with a sale price of $875,000. A hefty sum for, frankly, a hefty amount of important Plath and Plath-related documents. The news has me feeling like a kind outside of candy store. I can see inside, but cannot get it. The highlight of the collections are the letters and other papers that originated with Plath's "psychiatrist" Dr Ruth Beuscher Barnhouse. Included here are 14 letters from Plath to Beuscher (as was her then surname), from 18 February 1960 to 4 February 1963. Lopez estimates the 45 pages of letters consists of "about 18,000 words". In addition to the letters, there are files related to Plath's treatment at McLean Hospital from 1953-1954. Normally off-limits, these documents may reveal quite a bit about Plath's decision to attempt suicide in 1953, as well as perhaps di...

One of the most fascinating aspects of studying Sylvia Plath's poems, particularly the late poems, is considering them through the lens of their creation date. That is one way to read them, and in doing so you can sometimes see her using words and images in a consistent fashion, but also seeing how she progresses through her subjects. For example, if you read the October 1962 poems in chronological order you can see Plath reshaping her self, if you will, in her "Bee" poems written from 3 to 9 October. After reestablishing that self (a poetic selfie?), she turns to shed external, familial subjects (burdens) like her father and mother "Daddy" and "Medusa" respectively, written back-to-back as it were on 12 and 16 October. (Plath had spent the weekend after writing "Daddy" out of town in Cornwall.) But yet the poems read quite differently when done so in the published book format. Though written second, "Medusa" appears first in Ariel:...

At the time of Sylvia Plath's death on 11 February 1963, a vast amount of her papers --the majority perhaps-- were in her mother's house at 26 Elmwood Road in Wellesley. These papers now form Plath mss II at the Lilly Library, Indiana University at Bloomington . Aurelia Plath would later gave nearly 250 items to Smith College in December 1983. Have you ever worked with Plath's early poems at the Lilly Library (or at Smith or Emory, where there can be found also some copies)? The poems are in Box 7 (poems A-M) and Box 8 (poems N-Z). Additionally, many of Plath's early poems have recently appeared at auction and if you have taken the time to view the images online, you may have noticed small penciled-in numbers in the top right corner. Here are two examples from recent auctions: From Sotheby's December 2014 auction: Numbered 3b From Bonhams' March 2016 auction: Numbered 21/2 Tucked away in the back of Plath mss II, Box 15, Publications Scrapbook, are ...