The history of the gravestone of Sylvia Plath is tumultuous. On 30 April 1963, just over two months after Plath's death, Aurelia Schober Plath, the poet's mother, received a letter from Hilda Farrar, an aunt of Ted Hughes'.  Mrs. Plath routinely annotated her letters with thoughts about the correspondent, ideas for replies, and, as well, comments intended solely for her eyes. Her notations were made in something resembling cycles: both upon receipt and as well through re-readings over the years. Many were made, also, as she prepared her daughter's correspondence for publication in Letters Home (1975), and when she surveyed her daughters' papers—and part of her own archive—for sale to the Lilly Library (1977). In the letter cited above, Hilda wrote: "Billie [Ted Hughes' father] and I went to look at Sylvia's grave last week and he tidied it up as best he could. It appears it is unwise to put up a headstone for some months until the ground has had time...

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de...

Vanessa Thorpe in Sunday's Observer publishes " Sylvia Plath fans call for a fitting memorial to the poet ." Being that two of my good friends, Gail Crowther and Elizabeth Sigmund, were quoted in the article, I have to say outright I knew it was coming. I found both of their comments very sensitive and smart. The article was supposed to be about Elizabeth's poem "Shep-en-Mut" which appeared in Gail and Elizabeth's paper " A Poem, A Friend ", recently published in Plath Profiles 3 . But the article took a turn for the dramatic, as they are want to do by the editors wanting to get more hits and sell more papers. Can't fault them there, honestly. But it is a little disappointing to have had some expectation that were dashed and shattered. This is probably my own fault for foolishly being optimistic that Gail and Elizabeth's paper would receive some press, and that this might then give Plath Profiles greater visibility and awareness th...

A few of you may have read my paper " 'They Had to Call and Call': The Search for Sylvia Plath " in Plath Profiles 3. For this article, I used microfilm and internet resources to create a bibliography of articles on Plath's first suicide attempt on August 24, 1953 that vastly increases the known publications which ran the news story and builds upon those articles presented in previous bibliographies. Microfilm is presently the best resource we have for searching through older newspapers; and whilst it is not the sexiest technology out there it certainly does serve a good purpose. However, some genius decided to scan obscure & not-so-obscure newspapers from microfilm, run OCR, and make them searchable via Google News Archive . There are other tools for this kind of thing, such as ProQuest Historical Newspapers and others. However, since Google News Archive is largely free and doesn't require a subscription, this is one of my favorite tools and will great...

The power of Google! The above image is an satellite view using Google maps of Heptonstall, England, where one can find the grave of Sylvia Plath . Plath's grave is in the approximate area of the red box.