Marcia Brown Stern has two folders in the Rosenstein papers. The first is completely dedicated to letters from Plath. I was curious to see this folder as I just always felt there were letters missing...in part because when I was keeping track of the letters Plath mentioned writing, I noted down ten instances of letters to Marcia Brown Stern. Some may have been written a day or two or so after the reference, but it was very hard to determine. Happily, there was one new "letter" in the folder. It was a July 1952 birthday card with a lovely note written in by Plath. There is a chance this card accompanied the 23-24 July 1952 letter from Plath to Stern, as her birthday was on the 28th. But based on the actual letter and its envelope, it might have been sent separately. It is not, I do not think, a part of the Smith archive of her other letters received. So, I cannot help but wonder what happened to it. The real nitty-gritty though falls in the second folder of Stern materials. ...

When J (for Joseph) Mallory Wober first saw Sylvia Plath at a Labour Club meeting, he thought she might have been a town prostitute. He was born, a year to the day, after Warren Plath. After that he lived for a while in Bombay, India, arriving in Liverpool, England from Bombay, India, on 9 December 1945. Wober was a student at King's College, Cambridge, and lived on Peas Hill, at the time he met Plath. We are told at the beginning of these transcripts that most of the interview was not recorded because apparently Wober "forced" Rosenstein to "march" through Hyde Park, Belgravia, and Sloane Square. Exaggerate much? Wober told Rosenstein that Plath's "eyes were most expressive of the intensity of her existence." While in Cambridge, Wober asserts "her time was spent fighting off people who recognized her as a special kind of person." She was "beset" with admirers. Around Plath he felt "illumined" and more alive. He fe...

Richard "Dick" Wertz was the boyfriend of Nancy Hunter Steiner and was roommates at Yale with J. Melvin Woody and Richard Sassoon. Wertz and Hunter Steiner attended the same high school, as did  Woody and Marcia Brown Stern. Woody first met Plath through Brown in the summer of 1951. It is all so fascinating how these people from Massachusetts, New Jersey, Ohio, and North Carolina (via France) converge together. Here are their high school senior photographs, so you can see the principle figures. How odd that of all the yearbooks out there, the one that was scanned (belonging formerly to someone called Esther) included Marcia Brown's note and signature. In fact, before continuing with the blog post... after looking at these pictures, I think this very much deserves a song: Here's the story of a lovely lady Who was friendly with two very lovely girls All of them had perfect hair, which pleased their mothers With teeth as white as pearls It's th...

As a reader of Plath's diaries and letters, the name W. Wayne Sterling was familiar to me. So I was excited to see his folder of interview notes from 1971 to 1974. Winthrop, 1939 While Rosenstein refers to him as William, in Plath's time he went by Wayne and that's how you will see him referred to in Plath's diaries. She knew him from Winthrop, where he lived at 7 Enfield Road, which is nearly a mile from the Plath house on Johnson Avenue. Sterling mentioned Plath falling off a boat in high school and considered it a sort of suicide attempt. That is fairly sensational, as was his memory that Plath took an overdose of aspirin after her father's death (which he later recanted). While he was from Winthrop, he mentioned Wellesley High School of classmate of Plath's suicide (hanging in the woods of Wellesley College near the pond) which he thinks was the inspiration for Joan's death in The Bell Jar . He mentioned something else which is rather unspeaka...

Box 4, Folder 13 holds the interview notes and correspondence with Nancy Hunter Steiner, Plath's Harvard Summer School roommate and author of A Closer Look at Ariel (Harper's Magazine Press, 1973, and Faber, 1974). The book was published with an introduction by the late George Steiner . Hunter Steiner was "involved" with Plath at a critical point in her life from the winter and spring of 1954 through Plath's senior year. This was the period of Plath's return after the breakdown and after McLean Hospital. In parts, Hunter Steiner's memoir is really revealing in good many ways. They are more candid than the printed book. She directly calls Plath a "parasite", something not mentioned so explicitly in the book. Curiously, she had the same feeling during the 1954 Summer School term at Harvard, verbatim, as Ted Hughes expressed to Jillian Becker after Plath's death, at her funeral in fact: "it was either her or me". Dabbling in ...

One of the things that is a recurring theme is Rosenstein's interest in identifying the "Isidis" enlargement that was so important to Sylvia Plath and has built up around it a sort of mythic status. Time and time again, Rosenstein probes and wonders and asks her interview subjects about it. One has to presume she saw the photograph of Plath in front of it in Chalcot Square holding her daughter Frieda, and grew curious... Elizabeth Sigmund, who saw it in person in Court Green, says of it in her (rather epic, 21 pages of) interview notes: "it had immense power in the whole stature of the woman — it was very beautiful." We possibly take the "Isidis" poster for granted. We probably take a lot of granted now since we know so much more than was generally know in the first decade following Plath's death. However, for as much we may think we know, there is still a lot we do not know. Rosenstein's archive could have resolved a lot of questions ...

The other day in my post about the Al Alvarez file in the Harriet Rosenstein papers now at the Rose Library, Emory, I mentioned the "simple" poem that was being shuttled back and forth across the Atlantic in 1974. Of course there was more in the post than that "simple" poem. On Friday, Emily worked in Box 4, with folders 9-16. There were syncing problems with led me to malfunction. To be honest I am embarrassed about this, so let's try to move on. If you are familiar with the finding aid, you will see that this folder set included files for Margaret Shook, Elizabeth Sigmund, Alison Smith, Nancy Steiner, William Sterling, and Marcia Stern. (Also Stephen Spender, but I asked Emily to skip this folder as it just included an article he printed in Gemini , Spring 1957, which I have a copy of somewhere in my files...Plath mentioned it in a letter written that spring, see footnote on page 83 of Volume II, so I had previously looked this up.) I was anxious to rea...