There are a lot of files to go through which is great because what else can you really do that feels productive in the middle of the winter? One page per image; and I think Emily has been sending between 200 and 250 per day. Each set starts with a photograph of the the folder so that I know where the files start and end. It helps organize things and gives a real feel for the collection. And then the only other request I had to was to ensure that all edges of the page be visible. I do not know why I crave this, but I do. I suspect I have read about half of what has been sent. It takes me a while to read it... Most recently I read the big Macedo  folder and the moderately sized Roche one. I am rather enamored with the Roches as a result. They interviewed really well. Clarissa famously was featured in the video on Plath in the 1988 PBS  Voices & Visions series but this was the first time I recall reading anything by Paul Roche on Plath. One thing I particularly enjoyed in...

Karen V. Kukil, Associate Curator of Rare Books and Curator of the Sylvia Plath Collection at the Mortimer Rare Book Room, was interviewed today by WFCR's Jill Kaufman about the new letters from Plath to Clarissa Roche and the Plath collection at Smith College. Listen to it here .

The News Office at Smith College has announced that four letters written by Sylvia Plath from 1962 have recently been donated to the Sylvia Plath Collection housed in the Mortimer Rare Book Room. The letters are to Plath's friends Paul and Clarissa Roche, and were recently donated by their daughter Pandora Roche Smith. I read these letters recently on a day-trip to Northampton and they are from March 12, July 11, October 19, and October 25, 1962. This period coincides with Plath's writing "Three Women" up through her famous October poetic outburst. Roche visited Plath after the break-up of her marriaged in November 1962 and then once again in London early in January 1963. Plath and Hughes met the Roche's in Northampton, Mass. in 1957 when Plath was an instructor in English at Smith College. You can see a list of more libraries and archives and rare book rooms that hold Sylvia Plath's papers or related materials on the Archival Materials page of my website, A ...