It is time for HarperCollins to reset and reissue Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar . (Faber needs to do this too though for different reasons .) Get rid of the Foreword by Frances McCullough and eradicate the "Biographical Note" by Lois Ames. Let Plath's novel stand on its own and speak for itself. McCullough's piece is fine and interesting, but the 25th anniversary edition is even nearly 30 years old at this point; and Ames' "contribution" has festered with biographical and factual inaccuracies for more than 53 years.  There are a number of textual problems with the US edition to begin with, as I explored in an essay written in 2012 . But the Biographical Note by the late Lois Ames is in the cross hairs of my ire today. Page numbers here refer to the 1971 edition of the book. On page 282 there are two gaffs that that are shameful. The first is the statement that Plath won the Mademoiselle short fiction contest in August 1951. In fact, she won it in June...

For the Arvon course on Sylvia Plath's Prose that I co-taught with Heather Clark in June 2023 in Yorkshire , I re-read The Bell Jar  making note of the events Esther Greenwood experiences that source back to something lived by Sylvia Plath. For example, we know Plath resided at the Barbizon, which she morphed into the Amazon in the novel. The aim here was to develop, as it was, a "key" to The Bell Jar .  This key as structured right now has three columns. The first column is the scene from the novel--a word, a phrase, a sentence, etc. The second column is the chapter and page number for reference, using the first Heinemann edition (a photocopy of it!). The third column, then, is information about the source: a reference to a letter, a journal, or some other "thing" (that's a technical term) that came out of a direct experience Sylvia Plath had.  This project is something that I had long wanted to do and it helped me develop how I would present the novel to t...

Sylvia Plath's mother loved to tell the story about how her daughter co-opted some of her own experiences in the lines in the fourth stanza of the poem "The Disquieting Muses" which read, In December last year, a random thought popped in my own dismal head and that song mentioned, "the glowworm song". The reason this song and this stanza came to the forefront of my mind was the lovable scene in Love, Actually , where the children are on stage for their Christmas nativity play--the one with multiple lobsters that were present at the birth of J. C. They are singing and in costumes and what not..., so it is natural that I thought of Plath. Anyway, Wikipedia to the rescue with this article on The Glow-Worm  (aka "Das Glühwürmchen").  "The Glow-Worm Song" appears in the Paul Lincke operetta Lysistrata (1902).The article includes some translated-into-English lyrics and some historical information such as the fact the lyricist Johnny Mercer later r...

Sylvia Plath was in Paris five times in one calendar year. More specifically, she visited Paris five times from December 1955 to August 1956, that's within nine months. Her first stay was from 20 December to 31 December 1955.  She touched her feet in Paris again upon her return from Nice and the south of France on 8-9 January 1956.  Plath was in Paris for another long stretch from 24 March to 6 April 1956, leaving on the 6th to go from Paris through Strasbourg and then into Kehl, Germany, and onward to Munich, with Gordon Lameyer.  Then she spent the first portion of her honeymoon in Paris with her husband (and mother) from 22 June to 5 July. On her way back from Spain to England, she and Hughes stopped once more in Paris on 23 August until the 28th, this time without Plath's mother, though they were joined by Warren Plath.  Recently I was in Europe and had the opportunity to layover briefly in Paris, so I maximized the opportunity to do something I had never done be...

Today, 14 November 2023, was the Bonhams Fine Books and Manuscripts auction of twenty-five lots of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes books from the property, or now former property of Frieda Hughes. In the last few years, the Plath and Hughes rare book market has been simply flooded with stock but this has not, at least in the case of Plath who is more collectible than Hughes, meant that prices in the rare and antiquarian book market has stalled or leveled off.  As I have done in the past, here are a list of the sales. All prices below show hammer price first and then the final price including the buyer's premium. Please see the Bonhams website for pre-auction valuation estimates. In addition to the property of Frieda Hughes, there was a scarce uncorrected proof of the Victoria Lucas edition of The Bell Jar  in: Lot 72 :  This gorgeous book is estimated to sell for £4,000 - £5,000 (US$4,900 - US$6,200) and ultimately went for £6,144. Estimated: Untracked Hammer Price: Unt...

The following are the lots in the 14 November 2023 auction of The Property of Frieda Hughes of Sylvia Plath (lots 108-118) and Ted Hughes (lots 94-107) items. Ted Hughes: Lot 94 : HUGHES (TED) Meet My Folks!, FIRST EDITION, DEDICATION COPY, INSCRIBED, Faber and Faber, 1961 Lot 95 : HUGHES (TED) The New Poetry. A Selection Selected and Introduced by A. Alvarez, FIRST EDITION, PRESENTATION COPY INSCRIBED BY TED HUGHES TO HIS PARENTS, 1962; 3 carbons TH poems of 1960s, and annotated copy of Moorehead's Cooper's Creek (6) Lot 96 : HUGHES (TED) Wodwo, FIRST EDITION AUTHOR'S PRESENTATION COPY INSCRIBED "To Walter [Hughes] & Alice with love from Ted, May 67", Faber and Faber, 1967 Lot 97 : HUGHES (TED) Animal Poems, UNIQUE PRESENTATION COPY, ONE OF SIX COPIES INTERLEAVED WITH ALL 14 POEMS WRITTEN OUT BY THE AUTHOR, AND AN ADDITIONAL 18 POEMS ADDED IN MANUSCRIPT, [Richard Gilbertson, [1967] Lot 98 : HUGHES (TED) The Iron Man, FIRST EDITION, AUTHOR'S PRESENT...