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Sylvia Plath in Chequer

From time to time I have tweeted and/or written about auctions on eBay for Sylvia Plath items. I recently, selfishly found out about an auction for an item that I wanted with without promoting potential competition. This was greedy of me, especially considering the item would be, if I won it, a duplicate.

Sylvia Plath published four poems in Chequer 11: "Epitaph for Fire and Flower", "On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad", "Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper", and "November Graveyard" (Winter 1956-1957). When I saw that a copy was up for auction I decided not to tweet it out. I guess I am a bit of a hoarder? I have no idea where this copy came from, other than "England" of course. The first copy I got, as a gift, formerly belonged to Christopher Levenson, who himself is well represented in this issue of Chequer as well as Plath. An image of the cover of Levenson's copy is on the Periodicals page of my website for Sylvia Plath. Plath spent an ample amount of time with Levenson in February 1956 prior to meeting Ted Hughes.

What I love about seeing the periodicals Plath published in, besides her work, are the other articles and advertisements she herself would have seen and read. In something like Chequer, there is an added kind of intimacy to the publication as we "know" that Plath visited some of the places advertised, such as in this wonky scan of a page from Chequer advertising the Taj Mahal restaurant.


Plath frequented the Taj a lot during her first months at Cambridge, particularly with J. Mallory Wober (a lot of the letters listed in this Wober link are revised based on the work and research I did for the forthcoming edition of the Letters of Sylvia Plath).

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