The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1: 1940-1956 is officially published today by Faber & Faber in the United Kingdom. It is the moment many of us have been waiting for for a very long time. The 838 letters in Volume 1 begin on 19 February 1940 and end on 23 October 1956. The cut off date was intentional as that is the last letter Plath wrote before her 24th birthday. Thus Volume 2, you can deduce, begins with the first letter Plath wrote after turning 24. The book was edited by me (that's Peter K. Steinberg in case you forgot) and Karen V. Kukil. A number of readers of this blog and followers on Twitter have sent me messages and the like that the book is on the way. I find this level of excitement and enthusiasm for The Letters of Sylvia Plath so wonderful. So, thank you all for being patient as we built the book. There is more to come. Buy it from Faber , Amazon.co.uk , Book Depository . The HarperCollins edition will be published in the United States on 17 Octob...

The Grolier Club in New York City will host the exhibition "'This is the light of the mind': Selections from the Sylvia Plath collection of Judith G. Raymo" which opens today, 20 September 2017, and runs through 4 November 2017. On Thursday, 12 October, the Grolier will host a Sylvia Plath Symposium from 6:00 PM-8:00 PM. Speakers include Karen Kukil, Associate Director of Special Collections, Smith College; Peter K. Steinberg, co-editor of The Letters of Sylvia Plath ; and Heather Clark, Fellow, Leon Levy Center for Biography, CUNY Graduate Center. Moderator: Judith Raymo. Other details TBA. No charge, but reservations are requested. RSVPs from non-members should go to Grolier Club Administrative Assistant Maev Brennan, tel. (212) 838-6690, or e-mail mbrennan@grolierclub.org. A stunningly produced catalog has been printed and copies will be for sale via Oak Knoll. Looking forward to giving a talk and to meeting who ever shows up! The Grolier Club is lo...

For her third year at Smith College, Sylvia Plath changed houses from Haven to Lawrence. Lawrence House is a co-operative house and residents performed jobs in exchange for a reduced tuition. Plath roomed this year with Mary Bonneville, a senior. The room numbers have changed, but from descriptions, Plath and Bonneville lived in either room 6 on the second floor or room 24 on the third floor. With a major of English declared, Plath's studies this year were dominated by courses in this subject. She was required to take a Science course and this caused her quite a bit of concern. Plath was heavily involved with Press Board and other extra-curricular activities. During the first semester, her more-or-less steady boyfriend Richard Norton was diagnosed with tuberculosis while a student at Harvard Medical School and was treated at a sanatorium at Ray Brook, New York. Plath's notebooks for Medieval Literature, Milton, Modern Poetry, and Physical Science are held in Plath mss...

For a long time now, 2017 has appeared to be a banner, monumental year for Sylvia Plath with so much happening. So, last winter I pitched an article idea to the good people at Fine Books & Collections on Sylvia Plath and to my absolute happiness, they said yes and made it a feature-like story. Thus I got to work on what became "The Persistence of Plath" which is out now in the Autumn 2017 issue. My article discusses the National Portrait Gallery's One Life: Sylvia Plath exhibit; a member exhibit titled "This is the light of the mind: Selections from the Sylvia Plath Collection of Judith G. Raymo at the Grolier Club in New York City; and the publication of the  Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1.  I also mention conference Sylvia Plath: Letters, Words, Fragments. One Life  opened on 30 June and runs through 20 May 2018 and by now you know a lot about it. Raymo's exhibit runs from 20 September to 4 November 2017. The Letters of Sylvia Plath are publish...

This is the second post in a series on the Education of Sylvia Plath and it reviews the courses she took during the 1951-1952 academic year. In Sylvia Plath's second year at Smith College, she roomed with Marcia Brown (later Stern), in Room 6 of Haven House. This room was on the middle floor of the house (2nd floor American, 1st floor elsewhere). Plath's room faced the Davis Student Center this year and the room had a bay window, a nice architectural feature. View from bay window of Room 6, toward Library View from bay window of Room 6, toward Elm Street 1950s floor plan of Haven House As with her first year, Plath carried six courses and received 15 credits (Physical Education did not earn her any credit). Using the finding aid to Plath mss II at the Lilly Library , I have added some of the papers that Sylvia Plath submitted for her courses. Her artwork I am unable to attribute at this time, an oversight for which I apologize. Plath's notebooks for Govern...

Sylvia Plath's education was impressive. She attended grade schools in Winthrop and Wellesley, Massachusetts before matriculating with the class of 1954 at Smith College in Northampton. I have always wanted a single easy way to see which courses Plath was taking and when so as such I have made a series of blog posts on the subject of "The Education of Sylvia Plath". This is the first part, for her first year at Smith College, 1950-1951. Perhaps in time I can go a little further and do something like this for Plath's junior high and high school if the record is complete enough to reconstruct something meaningful. Using the Smith College course catalogs both in person and via the Archive.org , I have transcribed the courses from these sources that Plath herself would have read. They give an overview of the subject, but to read her notes and syllabi and papers would require traveling to the Lilly Library, Indiana University at Bloomington which holds the greatest num...

It seems to have been going on for ages, but The Letters of Sylvia Plath really took off sometime in 2011. Work began before this, by several years, but the daily grind of locating, transcribing and all the rest started about then. I think... It has been the most immense privilege to get to work so closely with Plath's letters and archives, with Karen V. Kukil (the co-editor), with Frieda Hughes, and the very good people at Faber and HarperCollins on this project. Not to mention the archivists and librarians and private citizens who have offered tireless help and information. After living with the manuscript in various states and sizes for so many years, it is with the utmost pleasure that I am publishing this blog post to let you know that the hundreds of letters comprising Volume 1 (1940-1956) is off my hands and has passed now the point of no return. THANK YOU ALL for your support and patience during this project. You will never really know, and nor can I ex...