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Plath Profiles 5 Preview

Some of you may have guessed that Plath Profiles 5 is nearly ready to be published...

One of the papers in the issue is authored by me and is titled "Textual Variations in The Bell Jar Publications." I wrote this paper because in reading Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar at least twice a year for the last 15 or so years, and in reading both British and American editions, the text became familiar but I could not reconcile why it read differently, depending on the edition read. Primarily I read a later printing of the first American edition from 1971 against a 1980s Faber paperback. Eventually I obtained a photocopy of the first Heinemann edition and read that, too.

But, the two editions of the book that set me on the three-year task were the uncorrected proof of The Bell Jar printed by Heinemann in 1962 and the 1996, 25th Anniversary edition published in America. These two especially are very different from one another. Mind you it is not as though the texts drastically differ: the primary differences are punctuation, some spelling as can be expected, etc. But in reading the proof of The Bell Jar, I also learned a bit about Plath's editorial eye, and I began to see that the only version/edition of this book that readers should read is the first Heinemann edition from 1963. (Faber apparently used the same typesetting when they published this book in 1966, and they used this same typesetting for nearly 30 years, so I think technically any Faber edition before 1995 should be the exact same text as the 1963 edition.) In working on this paper, too, I had to rely on the typescripts of the novel which are held by the Moritmer Rare Book Room, Smith College.

From the paper, "Because she died so young, Sylvia Plath's editors have had to speak for her and to make publication and other editorial decisions on her behalf. This sometimes has been controversial, sometimes questionable. This paper will present and examine the final choices Plath made to the text of The Bell Jar, based on comparisons between the uncorrected proof of the novel and its first edition... In addition, it will also compare the first Heinemann edition – my "control" edition, the only version of the novel to be approved for publication by Plath – to the novel's later publications: the first Harper & Row edition (1971) and the 25th Anniversary HarperCollins edition (1996)" (106).

The structure of the paper is a longish introduction with more text in footnotes probably, than in the main part of the paper, and then several tables where the differences in text are listed. I also include an appendix of those words appear in the editions of the books that have different spellings - in the order of appearance in the book - in either the UK or the US, that were not included as part of the textual variations tables.

More Plath Profiles 5 previews - including a guest blog post - over the next few days...

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