One of the other things I learned on my tour of 26 Elmwood Road in August was that I got the house that inspired the description of Dodo Conway's wrong. This new information was alluded to in a post on McLean Hospital last month. I have long known that Dodo Conway was inspired by Sylvia Plath's Wellesley neighbor Betty Aldrich. The Aldrich family -- C. Duane and Betty and their nine children -- lived at 23 Elmwood Road which is across the street at a diagonal to the Plath house. The house I thought inspired Plath's description was a little further down the road. Today, the Aldrich house, like many in Wellesley and other affluent towns, appears to have been greatly improved from the way it looked in the 1950s. Of Dodo and the Conways, Plath wrote in The Bell Jar : Dodo Conway was a Catholic who had gone to Barnard and then married an architect who had gone to Columbia and was also a Catholic. They had a big, rambling house up the street from us, set behind a morbid faç...

As the seats in the room began to fill, the nerves left me almost immediately: like morning valley fog burning off when the sun reaches a certain point in the sky. I became instantly happy. Jonathan Bengston (University Librarian ), Lara Wilson (Director of Special Collections and University Archivist), and Christine Walde (Plath scholar, Awesome-sauce and Grants and Awards Librarian) welcomed the standing and sitting room only crowd to Room 210 in the Mearns Centre for Learning at the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia. Their comments brought the assembled listeners up to speed with the context for the lecture/talk they were about to hear. 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the Special Collections at the university. The library holds some remarkable acquisitions including manuscripts and typescripts by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, as well as letters by Hughes. Indeed, some of the letters were written by Hughes with Plath in the room with him, giving present, sti...

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last...

In the past two months I have been doing a lot of research into Sylvia Plath's first suicide attempt on 24 August 1953. Maybe this is a morbid topic over which to obsess? However, I feel that it is an very fascinating topic and fortunately, somehow, I am able to not get too emotional over it. As a part of this research, I put online scans of all the articles I have found that covered Plath's suicide attempt. There are more than 200! I hope that you all use this resource; that you enjoy it and benefit from it. In processing all those files, and re-reading them, I grew more and more intrigued with the finer-point details presented in the 1953 articles themselves, in the biographies, in articles, and, of course, in Plath's wonderful novel The Bell Jar . A lot of my querying was further encouraged by my recent tour of Plath's 26 Elmwood Road, Wellesley, house. This got me wondering if the Wellesley Police Department might have any archival record of their role in sea...

Although the announcement was made several days ago and nearly broke the internet... I am really pleased to post on the blog that Director of Special Collections and University Archivist Lara Wilson and Grants and Awards Librarian Christine Walde of the McPherson Library at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, have invited me to give a lecture on Sylvia Plath. That is the second longest sentence recorded in history (see Henry James). On 27 October 2016, at 4:30 pm, I will be giving a talk entitled: "'She wants to be everything': Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar , Letters, and Archives". Here is the brilliant, sleek looking poster they made up for the event, which is helping to celebrate 50 years of the University's Special Collections. This is Sylvia Plath on Mount Monadnock, New Hampshire, from circa 17 July 1954. The photograph is from the Lameyer mss, Lilly Library, Indiana University at Bloomington. So, if you are in the Victori...

On 18 August, I was fortunate to give a tour of some Sylvia Plath sites to four women involved in the current The Bell Jar film adaptation: Kirsten Dunst (director), Dakota Fanning (lead actress), Lizzie Friedman (Producer, Priority Pictures), and Brittany Kahan (Producer, Echo Lake Entertainment). To my surprise, I was not nearly as nervous as I thought I would be. In part because I know the sites like the back of my hand, and also because all four were very relaxed and engaging and put me instantly at ease. We started in Winthrop where we saw Plath's house at 92 Johnson Avenue before carrying on to Deer Island and Point Shirley were we experienced Plath's writings in living color. Armed with the Journals of Sylvia Plath , her Collected Poems , and of course a copy of The Bell Jar , I read selected passages in situ which helped contextualize the real places Plath wrote about in her works. This exercise illustrated how she may have made creative changes after recording them...

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 ...