Sylvia Plath Collections: Stuart Rose Literary Collection

The Roy Davids' Collection (catalog description) auction held by Bonhams earlier this year featured wonderful Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and even Assia Wevill materials. The prices realized for the documents was quite substantial. I was curious at the time where they would end up… And now we partially know. Several of the auctioned items are now held by Emory University in Atlanta in the Manuscripts and Rare Books Library (MARBL) in the Stuart Rose Literary Collection (permalink). This is a fitting place for these materials as Emory holds a massive collection of Ted Hughes papers already. The collection features a substantial sub-series of Sylvia Plath materials (series 3), and in addition there are smaller collections, including Letters to Assia Wevill, among others.

The following are now available for research use with no stated restrictions on access:

Box 1 Folder 10: Hughes, Ted, "The Evolution of Sheep in the Fog," by Sylvia Plath, 7 working drafts, circa February 1988;

Box 1 Folder 15 Plath, Sylvia, "Night Thoughts," typescript draft and "Tonight in the infinitesimal light," autograph manuscript; and Ted Hughes, "Endless," autograph manuscript, no dates;

Box 1 Folder 17 (and oversize) Wevill, Assia, photographs.

The Plath poems in Folder 15 consist of a typescript of "Barren Woman" (though then the draft was titled "Night Thoughts" -- the poem was also called, for a time "Small Hours") and autograph manuscript of the second stanza of "I am vertical". An image of the stanza of "I am vertical" is visible on Bonhams website.

Thank you Stuart Rose for purchasing these materials and making them available for scholarly use via Emory University. Your actions are admirable and I hope they serve as a role model to others.

You can see more libraries that hold Plath materials on the Archival Materials page of my website for Sylvia Plath, A celebration, this is.

All links accessed 3 & 27 October 2013.

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

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

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

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Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last

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