Edward Butscher's biography Sylvia Plath: Method & Madness is now available in Kindle book format .  It is also available through Amazon.co.uk . In case you were struck, as I was, at the incessant repetition of the phrase "bitch goddess" in the text and wondered just how many times it was used...the mystery has been solved! It appears 40 times. 30 times as "the bitch goddess"; 3 as "her bitch goddess"; 2 as "imprisoned bitch goddess"; and 1 each as "emerging bitch goddess", "hidden bitch goddess", "raging bitch goddess", "combination bitch goddess", and "appellation bitch goddess." Phew, now I can get some sleep.

The Mortimer Rare Book Room in the William Allan Neilson Library at Smith College holds several different Sylvia Plath collections. The collection I will highlight here concerns Edward Butscher, Plath's first biographer. Butscher is almost single-handedly responsible for much of the information we know today on Plath. This does not necessarily mean he did a great job with the materials he collected, but all Plath biographers do owe him some credit. In fact, I have never successfully finished his biography; in some ways he may have done more harm than good. The collection begins with Butscher's correspondence. He was able to get information from a wide variety of sources. Some notable people in Plath's life are Richard Norton, Cyrilly Abels, Wilbury Crockett, and Myron Lotz, amongst many, many others. The collection also holds Butscher's research notes and manuscripts for his 1976 biography, Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness as well as his 1977 collection of essays, Sylv...