At almost the eleventh hour in working on Volume 1 of The Letters of Sylvia Plath  (above) I received PDF's of the letters Plath wrote to Melvin Woody. There was a mad scramble to get the letters transcribed, proofed, annotated, and integrated into the volume before we reached the point of no returns (a.k.a. Indexing). But, they made it. And in my correspondence with Mr. Woody, he let it be known that he planned to give his original letters to Smith College. I got him in touch with Karen Kukil, and later in the year, Karen visited Mr. Woody in New Haven to officially acquire the originals for the collection at Smith College. They join other caches of letters Plath wrote to friends she made during her Smith College years (Ann Davidow-Goodman, Marcia Brown Stern, Elinor Friedman Klein, and Philip McCurdy). This blog post is simply done to announce that the letters are now formally a part of the Sylvia Plath Collection at Smith and open to researchers. They are physically stored ...

Lot 339 at the recent-ish Bonhams sale of the Property of Frieda Hughes was a lot that I was interested in and bid on. Unsuccessfully. When I found out that Christian White of Modern First Editions was the winner I looked forward to seeing what entire lot of 21 items included. The biggest reason this lot interested me was the first book listed in the catalogue description: "JENKINS (ALAN C.) White Horse and Black Bulls , AUTHOR'S PRESENTATION COPY TO SYLVIA PLATH, inscribed "For Sylvia with every good wish and in the hope that you will stay in Devonshire. Alan" on the half-title, with later ownership inscription of Frieda Hughes, 1960." Jenkins was the step father of Plath's autumn 1962 live-in nurse Susan O'Neill-Roe Booth and who herself was the dedicatee of the poem "Cut". Susan's mother was Nancy Jenkins, who was secretary of the local bee keepers. They lived at a house called "Pear Trees" in Belstone, a village close ...

Dominic Winter, an auction house in England, recently featured a few Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes lots in their 21 June 2018 sale. In each instance the lot sold for more than the high estimate. Lot 838 was a lot of five Ted Hughes books and one Plath limited edition ( Child ). This sold for £220. Lot 866 was a very lovely first edition copy of Ariel (Faber) which sold for £500. Lot 867 was an uncorrected proof of The Colossus (Heinemann) which from the image appears to have been a stunning copy. This sold for £1,950. Lot 868 saw a nice looking first edition copy with a closed tear on the front of the dust jacket of Ariel  (Faber) sell for £420. On the previous day, 20 June 2018, Dominic Winter sold a 1967 copy of Plath's The Colossus  as part of a general lot which also featured J. D Salinger. Lot 535 sold for £130. It might be hard to think that any auction could ever possibly top the Bonhams event early this year selling the Property of Frieda Hughes. More ...

We are half way through the year just about and perhaps this blog post should have come earlier. However, with the recent publication of an important new book about Ted Hughes, let us take a look at the scheduled publications this year... Ted Hughes in Context , edited by Terry Gifford, was published recently on 21 June 2018 by Cambridge University Press. This collection of essays represents some of the most up-to-date explorations into Ted Hughes's work and life by leading Hughes scholars. Some names are familiar, some are new, which is exciting. It is an expensive volume, but one that I feel will be worth every single penny. It appears as though Faber is reissuing a bunch of books this autumn and winter by Ted Hughes too including How the Whale Became and Other Tales and The Dreamfighter and Other Creation Tales on 4 October and Collected Animal Poems (four volumes) and Season Songs on 3 January 2019. In the Sylvia Plath world, you may be living under the stones in...

As I did last year with Sylvia Plath's High School and Smith College scrapbooks, I wanted to get a catalog of the items in Ted Hughes' publications scrapbook help at Emory University. The scrapbook was started and probably largely put together by Plath; however there are a few post-Plath entries here so it is clearly something Hughes, his sister, or possibly Assia Wevill continued for a short while. I am grateful to the staff at the Rose Library at Emory for their assistance with this project, as well as to Amy S. Li for her assistance as well. The original scrapbook is very fragile and closed for researcher use, understandably. However, there are two sets of photocopies that are available. I worked with two sets of photographs of the scrapbook, one labelled "chronological" and the other as "facing pages". I have not (yet!) visited Emory but desperately want to so as such I feel slightly less connected to this scrapbook. However, I hope the informatio...

This morning I noticed on Amazon.co.uk that the Faber & Faber cover for The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2: 1956-1963 was displaying. So, I guess that means it is alright to show it here and elsewhere and let you all start thinking about it, discussing it, offering opinions, and everything else we are free to do with the information. So, here are the Faber and HarperCollins covers side by side. And for a reminder, here are the covers for the first volume. All links accessed: 11 June 2018

Sylvia Plath wrote her most famous villanelle on 21 February 1953 about Myron "Mike" Lotz, of Yale, whom she met over the Thanksgiving holiday in November 1952. I suspect many of us have been in that position before about a love interest; and in fact maybe some of you feel this degree of beautifully painful longing waiting for the next exciting Sylvia Plath Info Blog post? Right… Anyway, Plath sent the poem off to The New Yorker and Harper's . A typescript copy of "Mad Girl’s Love Song" held by Lilly Library, probably sent by Plath to her mother in her letter dated the same day of composition, includes the following note typed at the top: "this one had the honor of being inspired by one myron lotz…" ( Letters of Sylvia Plath , 567). The poem has quite an interesting publication history. "Mad Girl's Love Song" was first published in the Smith Review (Spring 1953). It then appeared in the August 1953 issue of Mademoiselle . Made...