Tomorrow at 19.00, the British Library will host the event " Triple-threat woman: The Letters of Sylvia Plath ". I will be speaking with the co-editor Karen V. Kukil; and we are joined by Heather Clark and Mark Ford. We have, each, fifteen minutes each to discuss various aspects of Plath's letters selected from those included in Volume II. It was difficult to find a few examples from the 575 letters in the book. I have titled my piece "The Reception of Sylvia Plath". Here's my title slide. I am looking forward to the event; to see old friends and make new ones. All links accessed 18 October 2018.

One cannot read and work with Sylvia Plath's letters, diaries, scrapbooks, or pocket calendars without noticing a trend. She loved movies, plays, and late in her life, the opera. She took in a film whenever and wherever she could in Wellesley, Boston, the Cape, Northampton, Cambridge (US and UK), London, and New York, to name several cities she cultivated in her quest for culture. When I was working on the Letters of Sylvia Plath , I included the cinema or theater name for the films, plays, etc. that she attended. I did this for a couple of reasons, one of which was this kind of information interested me and so I felt compelled to record it in case there are other like minded Plath readers out there. I wrote a little about this recently on Gail Crowther's website in a piece called " The Archival Stretch ". After a while of repeatedly seeing reference to these events, I decided to compile a list of all the films, plays, and what not that Plath took in using all th...

October is American Archives Month in the US, so let us look at the first of a few Sylvia Plath Collections I have been sitting on for years! As with much else at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City, their Sylvia Plath holdings are remarkable. As of 14 March 2017, the catalog returns more than 100 records when searching all collections. Certain collections are not applicable, such as Medieval Images Only and Music Manuscripts and Books. But, of those  records there are treasures lurking any reasonable way you sort it. The items discussed in this post were worked with one day in January 2017 and the excessive delay in posting about it was due to the embargo on anything to the with Plath's letters. My reason for the trip was to work with the letters from Plath to the Merwins and to William and Edith Hughes. If you want limited editions and rare books, the Morgan Library has something for you to look at. They have several copies of the rare printing of A Winter Sh...

The British Library will host an event on 23 October 2018 entitled " Triple-Threat Woman: The Letters of Sylvia Plath ". Tickets went on sale on 10 September and it has been exciting to see and hear of people making bookings. This blog post is simply to reiterate the information on the British Library events page. Insights into the life and work of a great writer Poet and novelist Sylvia Plath was a great letter writer, and a newly published collection ( The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume II: 1956–1963 , Faber and Faber) gathers letters from the period when she wrote her best-known works Ariel and The Bell Jar . Join the editors Peter K Steinberg and Karen V Kukil, and leading Plath scholars Heather Clark and Mark Ford, to explore the insights that they provide into her life and work. Alternating reflections on literature with quotidian episodes, the letters offer insights about her life as an American woman in England in the late 1950s and 60s, and her experience wi...

Just a brief blog post today to say Happy One Year Anniversary to the Faber edition of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume I: 1940-1956 , published one year ago today. All links accessed: 26 September 2018.

One of the most indelible memories of Sylvia Plath's 30 years was the famous and fierce hurricane of 1938 which affected Winthrop, Massachusetts on the evening of Wednesday, 21 September 1938, eighty years ago today, when Plath was nearly six years old. Plath wrote about the hurricane in a some of her works  but this post looks at just two. The first is her poem "The Disquieting Muses": Typescript of Sylvia Plath's "The Disquieting Muses" In this photo, showing the back of the 92 Johnson Avenue house in Winthrop, you can see the "study windows" Plath references in the poem. Facing the water are six, and on either side are three additional windows each. The math works out here: "twelve / Study windows..." And another appearance of the hurricane was in her last prose piece, "Landscape of Childhood" (published as "Ocean 1212-W"). The title of Plath's prose piece comes from her grandparents phone number...

The court case Smith College brought against Harriet Rosenstein concerning the fourteen letters from Sylvia Plath to Dr. Ruth Beuscher was settled on 27 December 2017. The court case docket number is/was 1784CV00769-BLS; the case was dismissed with prejudice, the outcome of which was negotiated between the two sides. Anyone can visit the courthouse and review the records generated in the case. In the settlement, Rosenstein surrendered the letters she had been a custodian of since the early 1970s to Smith College. I have known about the fate of these letters since early January 2018 and that they would be allowed in the second volume of Plath's letters shortly thereafter. I must, at this point, apologize to anyone and everyone who has asked me about them for I have lied my face off. But you have to understand, please, that I was expressly forbidden to discuss this matter. However, as of 6 September 2018, when the second volume of The Letters of Sylvia Plath  was published in...