By mid-October 1961, Sylvia Plath was already thinking about Christmas as she and Ted Hughes were hard at work making Court Green in North Tawton not just their own, but also livable. She mentioned in letter dated 13 October that year of her desire to make her daughter Frieda Hughes a doll's wood cradle. Christmas likely sprung into her mind as she had recently received a from her mother mentioning that she would be sending her granddaughter a doll for Christmas. The subject of the cradle was mentioned in general in subsequent letters to Aurelia and Warren Plath on 18 December 1961 and to her Aunt Dorothy Benotti on 31 January 1962. In " These Ghostly Archives 4: Looking for New England ", Plath scholar Gail Crowther discusses this very doll's cradle (see pages 44-47; an image of the cradle appears on page 45). Working with the documents Plath and Hughes created is one thing: particularly those which bear evidence of both the poets such as poetry or fiction manuscri...

Emory University recently put a finding aid online for the Sylvia Plath collection, 1952-1989 . A small collection, but one certainly with significant materials for the Plath scholar. The items were purchased in 2014 and include: Folder 1: Compass , Southeastern Massachusetts University, Summer 1987 Folder 2: Mademoiselle , January 1959 Folder 3: The New Yorker , August 3, 1963 [2 copies, one annotated by Aurelia Plath] Folder 4: Smith Review , Fall 1952 Folder 5: Smith Review , Spring 1953 [annotated by Aurelia Plath] Folder 6: Thomas, Trevor, Sylvia Plath: Last Encounters , 1989 [inscribed from the author to Richard Larschan and includes a letter from Thomas to Larschan and several clippings about the work] The material in folder 1, Compass is the the magazine of Southern Massachusetts University (now University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth), and features an article by Maeve Hickock titled "Aurelia Plath and Richard Larschan". The article is about the video produ...

The following is a transcription of the public statement offered by Peter K. Steinberg of the Sylvia Plath Info Blog, which aired on Seattle's WC 8 H 10 N 4 O 2 (the Starbucks Network) this morning at 4:01 A.M . local time. For the last eight years, Sylvia Plath Info Blog has been providing posts on Sylvia Plath covering a range of topics including archival materials, to newsworthy events, books and book reviews, and quasi-live blogging from conferences. Unfortunately, much the content and information presented has been done so under the influence of performance enhancing drugs. Admitting this at this point in time (I was going to hand write it in the attempt to have it come off as more sincere) is a big step for me in conquering the problem. Continually I had intended to try to break free of the grip these drugs have had on me. But to no avail. I want to apologize deeply and sincerely if I have let any of you down as a result of this admission. Kindness--in the form of co...

The Lilly Library From 16-19 March, I was at the Lilly Library, Indiana University at Bloomington, working with the Sylvia Plath archives there doing reference leg work and inquiry for the Letters of Sylvia Plath project. In the past, I have made nightly updates on the materials with which I worked, but I found this too time consuming for the kind of work I was doing this time around. In the process of being there, I was able to look through the majority of all the boxes and folders in Plath mss II; as well as dabbling a little in other, smaller collections  such as the Lameyer mss; Plath mss IV; Plath mss VI; and one book from her library, Christopher Fry's 1950 play The Lady's Not for Burning . The trip was very successful and rewarding, and the staff, from the Curator of Manuscripts Cherry Williams to Reference Librarian David K. Frasier and Public Services Assistant Zach Downey, and all the additional library staff who paged materials, brought them to me, took them aw...

To be sung to the tune of Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back": I like rare books and I cannot lie! The mass market paperback can just die... Rare books can sometimes be like watching sports. In sports, on any given day you may see something that has never been done before. In the case of books, you might suddenly see a copy of something that you did not know existed. In December, while browsing around ABEbooks.com , this very thing happened. One of the more memorable and famous books from the 20th century, which is celebrating 50 years of publication this coming March, was Sylvia Plath's Ariel . A copy of Plath's Ariel , a Faber first edition, second impression, recently came across my view. But it was unusual. The dust wrapper was different. The first editions that I have seen and held have three bands of color on the face and spine. Blue at the top taking up the majority of the space with the words ARIEL  in yellow, as if cut out; then that yellow in the middl...

Sylvia Plath has a reputation. In fact, she has many reputations. Sylvia Plath is most widely known for her life and her death; her novel The Bell Jar , and her poems, most notably those in Ariel but also for those works published in 1981 in The Collected Poems for which Plath did, after all, win the Pulitzer Prize. In recent years -- say since 1987 -- Plath's life has been the focus of attention as a number biographies have been published: and most of those with some drama or contention surrounding it. And in 2000, with the publication of her full journals, again the focus was displaced somewhat from her creative writing and onto her life. In some strange and perverse way, Plath's reputation --poetic and otherwise -- is because of Hughes, just as Hughes' own fast ascent as a poet of world-renowned can be credited to Plath who effectively and efficiently got his poems first in a wide array of reputable and international magazines, but also in book form. Fifty years a...

On Sunday 2 March 1958, Sylvia Plath wrote a letter to . . . her mother! I know! #Shocking. Wholly omitted from Letters Home  but available to read at the Lilly Library, the typed letter was written on the now famous pink Smith College Memorandum paper. Among other things, Plath writes that the night before --1 March-- was spent lazily seeing two films: one on Goya and another on a documentary on a bullfighter. The film on Spanish painter Francisco De Goya ( info ) was The Glory of Goya  (1950) and featured music by Andres Segovia, a musician Plath saw perform at Smith College as an undergraduate on 10 April 1954. The documentary on the bullfighter was the 1956 Mexican film Torero!  ( YouTube ) about the Mexican bullfighter Luis Procuna ( info ). The film on Goya is interesting as within three weeks Plath was on Spring Break, writing nearly a poem a day and all largely influenced by art, specifically modern art. Also this creative outbreak was inspired by ...