One way to add context to Sylvia Plath's letters and journals---that is, to her autobiographical life---during her years at Smith College is to read what was written about her by her classmates and/or other peers in the Smith College Associated News ( SCAN ) or The Sophian .  Plath mentioned SCAN in a letter from her first days at Smith (26 September 1950). But even though mentions in her own writings are scant, Plath was familiar with the newspapers and likely read them eagerly. It can be both enjoyable and illustrative to read the very words Plath read about herself in a way that feels more direct and immediate than through the transformation or translation of events by biographers. Here are some of the articles that appeared where Plath's name was mentioned. The article below appeared in The Sophian when Plath returned to teach at Smith and is about her prose work "Cambridge Vistas", which was first published in March 1956 as "Leaves from a Cambridge Notebo...

A friend recently let me know about a typescript page of some unidentified, untitled prose of Plath's wondered if I had seen it before. The answer was no, not really. However, after reading said typescript and Googling a random phrase, I learned that it was in fact published in the 1982 abridged edition of The Journals of Sylvia Plath (published in the US only).  Said text was printed in the Cambridge years section (1955-1957) under the heading of "Novel" on pages 150-51 of the abridged edition. It followed a subsection entitled "All the Dead Dears" and a "Poem" idea on page 149. The interlude from Plath's actual journals continues with the rather famous 25 February 1956 entry "Hello, hello. It is about time I sat down and described some things: Cambridge, people, ideas..." (151). For those with the unabridged Journals, the "All the Dead Dears" notes appears in an appendix on page 579; and the "Poem" idea a bit latae...

I meant to post this back in February but it slipped through the cracks.  On Monday, 17 February 1958, Sylvia Plath recorded in her journal about receiving in the mail a homemade Valentine from her friend Elinor Friedman Klein. Plath wrote: "then a black & white valentine from Elly with a photo-montage of lovers, of three men behind barbwire at a Concentration Camp clipped from the Times from a review which I read about tortures & black trains bearing victims to the furnace" (330). While it is not clear what the "photo-montage of lovers" might have been, that clipping of "three men behind barbwire at a Concentration Camp" came from the review "A Black Train Stuffed With Doom" by Frederic Morton about Jacob Presser's book Breaking Point (World Publishing). It appeared in the Book Review on 9 February 1958.  The etching was drawn by William Sharp, and appeared courtesy of the Weyhe Gallery. The etching was one of many of Sharp's u...

Sylvia Plath's wall, desk, and pocket diary/calendars offer the researcher a wealth of biographical and bibliographical information about her life, work, and times.  During her first year at Smith College, if Plath kept a calendar for her first semester its whereabouts is unknown. But the Lilly Library holds a wall calendar for 1951 which features crucial information about Plath's assignments, social life, and so much more. The calendar for 1952 is a desk calendar; as is the incomplete one for 1953 (due to her suicide attempt and recovery, entries slow down and cease by 24 August). The 1953 calendar features images of Germany and had has days, months, and other information all in the German language. If she kept a calendar for the spring term of 1954 its location is unknown. 1954-1955 Calendar From the summer of 1954 when she was at Harvard Summer School until the Spring of 1957 when she completed her degree at the University of Cambridge, Plath fairly regularly kept a log of h...

Plath's 1950-1953 journal Entry 118 in Sylvia Plath's journals shows her using some of her own primary source materials that she used in her active daily life which are held now in her archives.  Of course, the journal is an object we all know of, and a document with which some have even worked. But she references her wall calendar which she had with her that year at Smith College, in Wellesley, and in Swampscott, at the least.   Plath writes in her journal: "Suddenly, I stopped dead. I had opened my calendar to the month of August as usual, to write in the neat white box labeled with day and date, a scant summary of the activities completed in the last 12 hours. Sickened, I saw that I had unwittingly completed the last day of August. Tomorrow would be September. God!" (93). Because Plath's archives are dispersed all over the place, sometimes it can only be through visiting multiple archives, multiple times, before things really crystallize and make sense. Thi...

On the first of this year, I was going through some paperwork and computer files for a book-in-progress (more about this in my Year in Review post in December), and I stumbled upon two poems Sylvia Plath published towards the end of her sophomore year at Smith College.  I tweeted about it , drafted this blog post, and then forgot all about posting it because other things made it up on the blog first.  I knew as far back as 2015 that  Plath had published something in the Commencement, 1952, issue of Campus Cat , but the humor magazine lists contributors but anonymizes the work therein by not including by-lines. Campus Cat  does not appear in Plath's hand on extant typescripts of the poems that I have seen...but it is certain I have not seen all of Plath's typescripts...so this might not be news to some... On page 1 of the issue, Plath's poem "Virus TV: (We Don't Have a Set Either)" appears under the title "T.V. Or Not T.V.", and there is a prose parag...

The idea for this post came to me back in August 2012! And for no real reason other than gross negligence, it has been festering in my "Blog Drafts" folder since then. I meant to post it in 2019, but then somehow now it is 2021. Today is the day to change all that. Better now, perhaps, than never. Sylvia Plath used a number of different typewriters during her lifetime. The typewriter identified in the below 1954 photograph of Sylvia Plath at her 26 Elmwood Road house in Wellesley is the Hermes 2000. More about Hermes typewriters . When Plath was at Smith College as a student and into her time at Cambridge when she was on Fulbright, she used the Smith-Corona Sterling. The above photo on the left was simply, permanently, borrowed from an eBay listing. However, there is a photograph of Plath's own typewriter, on her desk in Lawrence House, in her Smith College Scrapbook held by the Lilly Library. In this photo (above right, cropped), the distinctive ligh...

Sylvia Plath's copy of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (London, Faber and Faber, 1956) is another of the books from her personal library held by Smith College and open for research. Her copy was the second impression, February 1956. Her ownership inscription on the front free endpaper reads, "Sylvia Plath, 1956". The play debuted in London at the Arts Theatre on 3 August 1955 and shortly thereafter transferred to the Criterion Theatre, which is where Plath saw in on 20 September 1955, mere hours after landing at Southampton earlier in the day. Her pocket calendar, held by the Lilly Library that likely no seconds were wasted in exploring her new city and country: Breakfast at 7 on board the ship; photographed in a group by Evening Standard ; customs; train to London (Waterloo); bus to Regents Park; attended speeches and teas; dinner with Carl Shakin, her "shipboard romance"; and then Waiting for Godot . In her 25 September 1955 letter to her mot...