In December 2015, Ruth Geissler (nee Freeman) donated twelve letters from Sylvia Plath to her mother Marion Freeman to Smith College in honor of her daughter Susan, Smith class of 1978. In my 2015: Year in Review post ,  I wrote a little bit about befriending Ruth as part of the forthcoming Letters of Sylvia Plath  book. There, I mention that I Karen V. Kukil and I visited Ruth in November but what was absent from the post was our purpose... Which was to collect the letters from Ruth, meeting at the time two of her daughters, Susan and Joan. The cache of twelve letters complements the Mortimer Rare Book Room's holdings of other Plath correspondence, joining letters to the late Marcia Brown Stern, Ann Davidow-Goodman, Philip McCurdy, Elinor Friedman Klein, Hans-Joachim Neupert, and Clarissa Roche. The dates of the twelve letters are as follows: 16 April 1946 4 November 1946 17 November 1951 1 January 1952 1 August 1952 16 January 1954 28 April 1955 circa 12...

Bonhams Knightsbridge held a Fine Books, Atlases and Manuscripts auction today 16 March 2016 . There were six lots of Sylvia Plath items, Lots 140-145. All lots sold and the typed letter in a birthday card was the big seller. Congrats to the owner(s) of this material! Here follows the results: Lot 140 Sylvia Plath Autograph drafts, notes, drawings and doodles for her story "Stardust", comprising a page of fairy sketches (with three red lipstick kisses applied by the author), [1946-47] Sold for £5,000 / US$7,088 Lot 141 Sylvia Plath Birthday card to her mother with autograph message signed ("much love to my favourite mummy! your Sivvy"), with a long typed letter within, Friday, 24 April [1953] Sold for £6,000 / US$8,605 Lot 142 Sylvia Plath Collection of typescripts of nine early poems, including "Ice Age", "In Memoriam", "Incident", "Crossing the Equinox" and others The other poems are: "I Have Found t...

According to the mimeographed schedule of Sylvia Plath's appointments while a Guest Editor at Mademoiselle , on 17 June 1953, she and the other Guest Editors to attend a tea at Vanity Fair (640 Fifth Avenue) at 3 pm, and then at 8 pm (probably) a film preview of Let's Do It Again ( IMDb ; Wikipedia ) at Columbia Pictures, 729 Seventh Avenue, New York, New York. However this was the day the editors were all down with ptomaine poisoning so... Anyway, in The Bell Jar , there is the most memorable scene before the ptomaine takes hold in the cinema: The movie was very poor. It starred a nice blonde girl who looked like June Allyson but was really somebody else, and a sexy black-haired girl who looked like Elizabeth Taylor but was also somebody else, and two big, broad-shouldered bone-heads with names like Rick and Gil.  It was a football romance and it was in technicolour.  I hate technicolour. Everybody in a technicolour movie seems to feel obliged to wear a lurid costume ...

The Campus Cat , Commencement 1952 In the spring of 1952, Sylvia Plath was a very active young woman at Smith College. Completing her sophomore year, Plath was doing well academically, but also socially and in terms of extracurricular activities. She was involved with Press Board, covering campus events as well as sending out news stories to local papers. But she was also involved with a small publication called the The Campus Cat . The Campus Cat was a publication created by Smith students in 1918. Its contents provided information to the campus about going-ons, events, activities, and poked fun at the rituals, trials, and stresses of academia and life on the Smith campus. Contributions to the periodical were anonymous, though the contributors were listed in the front of the magazine. In her 1952 calendar, held by the Lilly Library, Indiana University at Bloomington, Plath has three reminders on 3, 7, and 14 May 1952. On the 3rd she worked on writing her piece; on the 7th...

When Sylvia Plath died she left plans in suspension. On 11 February, she was supposed to meet her new editor at Heinemann David Machin for lunch. He sent a letter on 12 February asking "Did something go wrong about our lunch date yesterday…" It is one of the most haunting and chilling documents I have ever worked with and is held by the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College. The rest of this post looks at some of the events which we know Plath had planned and commitments in the works and how some of them turned out. On 12 February 1963, an article ran in the Financial Times titled "Cheltenham Festival of Literature". In the short article, which appears to the left, it was announced that "Sylvia Plath, Edward Lucie-Smith, and Jon Silkin are the three judges appointed to select the prize-winners of the Guinness Poetry Competition organised and in conjunction with the Cheltenham Festival of Literature…" (22). The article was reprinted in the Irish T...

I had quite a different post planned for today, but then the following was made known to me so I called an audible... You'll get today's planned post next Thursday... Bonhams Knightsbridge is holding a Fine Books, Atlases and Manuscripts auction on 16 March 2016 . There are six lots of Sylvia Plath items, Lots 140-145. These are part of that big 2 December 2014 auction that Sotheby's failed to sell . Back in November 2015 Bonhams held a very successful sale of a couple of lots from this private collection ( results ). The lots are: Lot 140 Sylvia Plath Autograph drafts, notes, drawings and doodles for her story "Stardust", comprising a page of fairy sketches (with three red lipstick kisses applied by the author), [1946-47] £4,000 - 6,000 / US$ 5,800 - 8,600 Lot 141 Sylvia Plath Birthday card to her mother with autograph message signed ("much love to my favourite mummy! your Sivvy"), with a long typed letter within, Friday, 24 April [195...

I was surprised recently to discover that I have been looking for the press releases that Sylvia Plath wrote for Smith College's Press Board for more than six years. This was determined judging from the file creation dates for some PDF's that I have. Granted, this project was done off and on as time and as information from my various researches permitted, but it is a long time and I think this post will represent closure on the project (for now). One of Sylvia Plath's Press Board and course notepads, held by the Lilly Library. In March 2015 I spent four days at the Lilly Library . Held there are a couple of spiral bound notebooks that Plath used for recording impressions and quotes and interview notes that she then used to write her releases. This was really valuable information because it also complemented her wall calendars where she noted down class assignments, dates, extracurricular activities, vacations, films and plays, and other details of her life at Smit...