Azalea Path is one of the more famous "addresses" in the life and oeuvre of Sylvia Plath and it does not house a house at all. Rather, it is the cemetery avenue in which her father, Otto Emil Plath, was laid to rest. Otto Plath immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1900 at the age of 15 years old. He settled eventually in Massachusetts, marrying his wife Aurelia Schober Plath, in January 1932. After the birth of a daughter, Sylvia, in 1932, and a son, Warren, in 1935, the Plaths elected to move. They selected Winthrop, a peninsula just north and east of Boston, strategically as it was the town in which his wife grew up and her parents still lived there. As the 1930s came to a close, Otto Plath's health began to decline. He passed away on November 5, 1940, of an embolism in his lung after being diagnosed with diabetes mellitus and having a gangrenous left leg mostly amputated. His funeral service was held at the Reynolds Funeral Home on November 9 and he w...

Recovering from an appendectomy in London, on 6 March 1961, Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother: "& I must say I have secretly enjoyed having meals in bed, backrubs & nothing to do but read (I’ve discovered Agatha Christie – just the thing for hospital reading – I am a whodunit fan now)..." ( Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol. II 584). However, as Plath was attuned to popular culture, she had heard of Christie before, signing a letter to Elinor Friedman roughly six years earlier on 28 September 1955, "Hercule Poirot." Later, on 15 August 1962, Plath and Hughes attempted to dust off their recent marital issues to attend a performance of Christie's play The Mousetrap with Olive Higgins Prouty, then performing at Ambassadors Theatre, West Street, London. There is no proof that Sylvia Plath read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, though it is evident that she had a familiarity with his famous creation, the detective Sherlock Holmes. She cited both Watson and Sherlock (by...

The archival finding aid is many things. It is a textual map.  It serves as a basic outline of a collection. It is also a key. It provides information, sometimes minute (item level) and sometimes very broad and general.  The Plath mss II finding aid is a wonderful document which was created by the Lilly Library in 1977, the year of the collection's acquisition from Aurelia Schober Plath. It has been online for as long as I can remember and may be one of my most frequented web pages.  When I was rummaging... I mean... when I was on my recent very serious research trip which helped to put the finishing touches on my current book project (the final manuscript of which was submitted recently), I went through boxes 8-15 methodically, folder by folder, and for the most part page by page. I spent the most time in boxes 13 through 15, perhaps, for no other reason than it was material with which I barely spent much time reading on previous research trips.  In box 13, folders...

On Thursday, six Sylvia Plath limited edition books are offered for sale through Forum Auctions in England. Lot 179 is a collectors dream, assembling the following books:  Lyonnesse , number 120 of 300 copies, original morocco-backed boards, , t.e.g., others uncut, slip-case, Rainbow Press, 1971; Three Women , number 168 of 180 copies, printed in red and black, illustrations by Stanislaus Gliwa, original pictorial cloth, gilt, glacine dust-jacket, Turret Books, 1978; Crystal Gazer and other poems , number 107 of 300 copies, light toning to endpapers, original cloth-backed boards, t.e.g., others uncut, slip-case, Rainbow Press, 1971; Child (Rougemont Press, 1971), A Day in June (Embers Handpress, 1981), and Million Dollar Month (Sceptre Press, 1971) round the lot out. In addition to this Plath lot, there are a number of Ted Hughes book lots. See lots 113 to 116. All links accessed 5 June 2022.

On 3 June 1953, sixty-nine years ago today, Sylvia Plath was at work as the Guest Managing Editor at 575 Madison Avenue in New York at the offices of Mademoiselle magazine. Plath's calendar, held by the Lilly Library, indicates that her schedule that day was included taking the "Last word pix" in Central Park. The "Last Word" was some text Plath wrote to accompany the photograph of all 20 guest editors in star-shape. Plath is, famously perhaps, at the top of the formation. Janet Wagner is holding Plath's right hand. Carol LeVarn is the blonde on the far left.  The names captioned below follow the star from Plath's right hand counter-clockwise to Plath's left. Anne Shawber (number 9) is the bottom left young woman with her right leg out, and Dinny Lane (number 13) is the bottom right woman with her left leg out. You do the hokey-pokey and you turn yourself around... The far right is Margaret Affleck (17). This photograph was taken at the Bethesda Terr...

Sylvia Plath was ecstatic when Poetry accepted six of her recent poems in October 1956. She wrote to Ted Hughes, "POETRY has accepted SIX of my poems!!!!!!!!!! Like we dreamed of. Didn't I say the Fulbright would start the trigger?" ( Letters, Vol I , p 1292). It was the largest batch of her poems, to date, that were accepted; they appeared in the January 1957 issue. Another four poems followed in July 1957. Plath's dream of being in The New Yorker is well known; her first acceptance was in June 1958 when the magazine took "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor" and "Nocturne" (published as "Night Walk" and then "Hardcastle Crags".) The magazine regularly accepted her work after she broke through. But they did not publish them all in a necessarily timely fashion. In her life, she saw nine of her poems in their "queer wobbly" font. After her death, they printed seven poems in their 3 August 1963 issue. Hughes published "G...

The other day I was looking at some of my photographs from one of the Lilly Library's wonderful Sylvia Plath collections and I was instantly inspired to present some of the information to you in a blog post.  In Plath mss II, Box 7, 1949 loose items, there are a bounty of Plathian things that she once used in her daily or perhaps more ephemeral life. On the day I photographed the contents---a perk I had due to my editorial work on Plath's Letters , the contents were: 1. Typed on a small, blue sheet of paper: "An End" by Sara Teasdale, which ends "And summer will not come to me again". Plath famously used this as the title for her short story which was her first fictional piece in Seventeen  magazine.  2. Record of Summer Dates for July and August 1949 3. Handwritten quote from Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus , "The Everlasting No":  "How beautiful to die of broken-heart, on Paper! Quite another thing in practice; every window of your Feel...