As you know, or should know, I post on Sylvia Plath's first suicide attempt every year on 24 August. Or, I try to. In the past, such blog posts have detailed newly found articles from cities and towns across the United States. This got me thinking: It is fine and dandy to write about them, but how about sharing visuals with you all? Well, I have seen to that. Over on my website for Sylvia Plath, A celebration, this is , visitors can now see and download PDFs or JPGs of all the articles that I have found on Sylvia Plath's first suicide attempt in August 1953. It is my eternal hope that by seeing the list of articles and now the articles themselves, that the sensation this story was, and the concern and chaos and confusion, can be truly grasped. So, please head over to the " Bibliography of Newspaper Articles on Sylvia Plath's First Suicide Attempt in August 1953 " and click around and save some files. Most of the articles come from microfilm either held by ...

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes traveled to the end of Spain for their honeymoon in the summer of 1956. After getting married, they went from London to Cambridge to London to Paris to Madrid, where they rested before moving on to Alicante and, ultimately, Benidorm. They left Spain via Barcelona on 22 August 1956, stayed in Paris for about a week, and returned to England on 29 August 1956. In all she had been one the continent for more than two months. This post is about Plath's time in Benidorm and was inspired by Gail Crowther's finding and sending me the following two videos in April: Benidorm in Color, 1950s and Antique photographs of Benidorm . These, in congruence with a long paper on Plath's time Benidorm "De quan Sylvia Plath va vindre a Benidorm" by Pasqual Almiñana Orozco , were positively revelatory in my understanding more clearly than ever Plath's time there. Of course, one cannot consider Plath's time in Benidorm, also, without use of the ri...

Gail Crowther and I have, today, submitted the manuscript of our book of essays,  These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath , to our publisher Fonthill. The authors mirroring Plath & Hughes in 3 Chalcot Square, London As many of you may know, Gail and I co-wrote a series of five papers entitled "These Ghostly Archives" which appeared in Plath Profiles from 2009 to 2013. While we encourage you to re-read these papers ( linked here ), please do not memorize them or anything as they have all be revised and expanded extensively. We did this as the narrative of the book is necessarily different to the way they were presented in their annual publications in the journal. The Lilly Library, Indiana University at Bloomington The book has an introduction and eight chapters (5 conversation chapters in the vein of the original papers, two solo chapters, and one jointly written chapter). In addition, we have submitted a number of photographs of Plath (many pr...

On Wednesday, 20 July, it was announced that Kirsten Dunst is set to make her directorial debut with a new adaptation of Sylvia Plath's only finished novel, The Bell Jar , starring Dakota Fanning in the lead role as Esther Greenwood. Since then, the news has gone viral which is not surprising in the least. In 2007, word spread that a film was in the works headlined by Julia Stiles and Tristine Skyler (screenplay), but unfortunately this project did not come to fruition. In fact, a blog post about the project was the second post ever here on the Sylvia Plath Info Blog. In May 2008, I posted a letter from Julia Stiles  herself on this blog about the project. We can and should lament that the Stiles/Skyler project never happened. I witnessed them conducting research at Smith College and provided information and resources when asked. So I know first-hand the lengths to which they went in creating a screenplay that would honor Plath herself and the work she did in writing The Bell ...

In Sylvia Plath's senior year at Bradford Senior High, 1949-1950, she was co-editor with Frank Irish of The Bradford . As with the previous posts covering Plath's first   and second  years at high school (posted on 1 July and 7 July, respectively), below is a list of those newspapers which were published during Plath's final year at high school. Here I describe the known contributions Plath made to The Bradford from the fall of 1949 to spring of 1950, as well as the instances where she was mentioned. The list of contributors for each issue appeared on page 2. If Plath's name appeared, I have listed the department and/or role. There are instances where Plath's name was not listed, which we can take to mean she contributed no content or was accidentally left off (though that seems doubtful). The departments typically were Features, News, Business, Sports, Typing, and Art. Each newspaper, excepting April 1949, was a four pages in broadsheet format. Each newspaper ...

This is the second post on Sylvia Plath's participation with and contributions to The Bradford . (Read the first was post .) This post looks at Plath's junior year of high school, 1948-1949. But first, a side-story. One of the first things I found when working with the archive was that Plath was the subject of a feature article on 20 December 1977. Kathleen Offenhartz's "Bradford Remembers: Sylvia Plath" is a measured piece with some revealing information. The article appears on pages 1 and 3. Upon reading page three, among several other things ye olde Archive Fever 103° took hold as re-printed there from an earlier issue of The Bradford was Plath's poem "Fog". Like me you might be saying, "But in none of the bibliographies of Plath's work is there an entry in the 1940s for a poem entitled 'Fog'." Well now: clearly we were mistaken. This 1977 find sent me hurtling back to the 1940s. I quickly found all 18 issues for the...

On a day in March, I visited Wellesley High School to look through old copies of the school newspaper, The Bradford . Sylvia Plath attended the school under its former name: Gamaliel Bradford Senior High. Also in its former location as the old school was razed a few years back. As a last minute decision, according to her diary, Plath decided to try out for The Bradford and was accepted to join the staff of the school newspaper. For the next three years, Plath was a contributor in many ways to the school paper, ultimately becoming its co-editor for her senior year, 1949-1950. The Bradford was then published six times a year. Usually around late October, right before Christmas, and then early February, late March, late April, and early June in time for graduation. Working through this archive proved very fascinating. Much of the paper is like the crummy paper in mass market paperbacks: its acidity eating it away to the point where it is very brittle and crumbly. This is the first ...