For Sylvia Plath's 90th birthday---"a love gift. Utterly unasked for"
For a limited time only I'm offering to access to more than 3,300
#SylviaPlath
files: articles & obituaries & reviews (her works & some bios/criticisms).
Permission may be required.
Seeing the
@NewYorker
review of The Letters of Sylvia Plath in print gives me the good shivers. Thank you
@dchiasso
for such a beautiful, thoughtful, and epic review.
Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar was published
#OTD
14 January 1963: that's 59 years ago. Show me, please, the first copy of the book that you bought/received.
This is mine.
The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol II was listed as a book of the decade in the Sunday Times (London): “Terrible in their intensity”, this first full collection of the poet’s late letters are “unmatched in literature”, said our chief literary critic John Carey.
#Vol1Matters
Sylvia Plath sat in the tree at Top Withens on 31 August 1956. So did I and a number of others from the Sylvia Plath/Ted Hughes Summer School 24,400 days later on 21 June 2023.
Sylvia Plath at Ilo Pill's apartment in Harlem (Lexington Ave and 123rd Street) with (L-R) an aunt and her beau and Ilo Pill's mother, circa 28-31 March 1954.
Poet Sylvia Plath died
#OTD
11 February 1963. She wrote in "Three Women":
"I find myself again. I am no shadow
Though there is a shadow starting from my feet. I am a wife.
The city waits and aches. The little grasses
Crack through stone, and they are green with life."
#OTD
10 June 1953, more than a third of the way through her Guest Editorship at Mademoiselle, and what became her "Bell Jar" summer, Sylvia Plath was photographed atop the St. Regis Hotel in NYC. The dress is now at Smith College.
If you were a friend of Sylvia Plath's family, in the mid-1950s you might have received these Christmas cards in the mail.
Happy holidays to you all. Be well, be safe, be warm.
Sylvia Plath on
@Newnham_College
, Cambridge: "here, I feel, is the place to create. it is quiet, enchanting, with all the opportunity of the richest of private lives."
In The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood's teacher calls a story she wrote 'factitious'. She didn't know what it meant so she looked it up: 'artificial, sham'.
This is
#SylviaPlath
's dictionary showing the exact words of the definition.
#OTD
, 11 October 1962, Sylvia Plath wrote "The Applicant". But did she do so before or after she took Ted Hughes to the train station (at Exeter?) "with all his stuff, clothes, books, papers"? The next day she wrote "Daddy".
This paragraph in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar is, I feel, among the most important. Not just in the novel itself, but also to how dangerous the distortions of living a real life under a bell jar can be.
Sylvia Plath was just over 14 1/2 years old in May 1947 when this photograph of her by a flowering bush was taken.
It is one of my favorites.
Reply and show me one of yours!
Did you know that the Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume II: 1956-1963 will be published by
@FaberBooks
in less than one month? If you're excited, like & retweet!
I haven't tweeted this for a while, but I think it every moment of every day. Thank you for your likes-retweets-comments. You make Sylvia Plath on Twitter a rewarding & enriching experience. I appreciate you all & feel truly privileged to interact with you. Thank you.
Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar was published
#otd
, 14 January 1963, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. I often wonder how she felt about the dust jacket. Do you? Do you like it? Here is one of the first reviews from the Glasgow Herald, 17 January 1963.
Sylvia Plath on visiting Paris December 1955: "I have fallen in love with the city. It is all light, airy, spacious [...] Christmas, I went to services in Notre Dame, with its flower-decked altar to the Virgin, exquisite rose windows, and enchanting gargoyles." Letters, Volume 1
Sylvia Plath loved spaghetti. Here's the number of times she wrote it in various documents.
Diaries
1944: 2
1945: 1
1946: 3
Calendars
1954-5: 2
1955: 3
1955-6: 6
1956-7: 1
1962: 9
Smith Scrapbook: 1
Letters:
Vol I: 3
Vol II: 7
#NationalSpaghettiDay
Two views of
#SylviaPlath
on her birthday.
ALS to her mother, 27 October 1952 &
TLS to Hans-Joachim Neupert on 21 March 1952
Read the full letters in The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1, 1940-1956.
Paperback editions of The Letters of Sylvia Plath to be published by
@FaberBooks
in one month!! Don't judge these books by their glorious covers. They have some textual corrections and updates as well as, more importantly, new letters!
Today is
#NationalChocolateChipDay
. Sylvia Plath enjoyed making chocolate chip (Toll House) cookies. Here she is eating cookies at Crane Beach, Ipswich, Mass. circa 19 or 23 June 1955.
#HappyFriday
. Eat Chocolate Chips.
Going to start reading Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar today. This is the 25th consecutive December in which I'll read it. But which edition? Choices, choices, choices...
One of Sylvia Plath's bears.
That photograph album has SO much incredible information in it. I'm reacting far more emotionally to seeing it in its entirety than I thought I word. Whoa. Just whoa.
An amazing week ends for the Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes Summer School. Thanks to
@Plathbiography
and Arvon and all the students and guests. And to Helen for the Devon honey!
Every once in a while I just have to stop and look at Sylvia Plath's starred ownership inscription in her copy of The Bell Jar.
Everything about this makes me smile.
#OTD
19 April 1962 Sylvia Plath wrote, in a marathon of drafts, "Elm". Here is a photograph of
#SylviaPlath
with her children taken a few days later as well as the Court Green elms from the early 1970s.
It took me eight full days of reading from 6:30 am to 9:30 pm, but I just finished
@Plathbiography
's Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath.
Thank you, Heather, for writing this colossus.
Sylvia Plath shares her birthday with Dylan Thomas. This is her copy of Thomas' Collected Poems which was given to Elizabeth Sigmund (dedicatee of The Bell Jar) by Ted Hughes after Plath's death. Elizabeth annotated this with Plath's headstone inscription.
#OTD
17 February 1963, Al Alvarez's short obituary for Sylvia Plath was printed in the Observer along with a photograph and four recent poems: "Edge", "The Fearful", "Kindness", and "Contusion".
New Sylvia Plath Info Blog Post: Paul Alexander has organized The Sylvia Plath Symposium at Hunter College, New York City with
@plathpoem
@Plathbiography
and many more!
Wishing everyone a great, safe, and peaceful holiday season and conclusion of 2023. Thank you all sincerely for your interactions on this plathform.
#sylviaplath
Look for a new Sylvia Plath Info Blog post on 1 January 2024.
"There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind
Pours by like destiny, bending
Everything in one direction."
Sylvia Plath "Wuthering Heights"
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes on 18 July 1961 at Mexborough Grammar School, Yorks., with two students. The day before, in London, Plath read "Tulips" at the Poetry at Mermaid festival.
Absolutely love this photo of Sylvia Plath from circa spring 1953 on the cover of the 2 November 2018
@TheTLS
. It was first used on the paperback cover of Paul Alexander's Rough Magic way back in the 1990s.