Sylvia plath author biography formation
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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 1952 with publication
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Two years ago on this day inom read an interesting blog post on Sylvia Plath Info Blogabout an anthology from 1963 I had not heard about before, containing two of Plath's poems. It was The Modern Poets: An American-British Anthology, edited by John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read, published by McGraw-Hill Book Company. The poems were "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" and "The Colossus". What interested me especially was that the anthology was released soon after her death, and that she may have been involved in the planning of it sometime during the last year of her life. It seemed like a fine selection of poetry, so I ordered an inexpensive copy of the same, hardback first edition described on the blog, a former library book from Stanford University Library, and a few weeks later it arrived in my mailbox in Norway.
It fryst vatten a beautifully produced and broad collection of poets c
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Sylvia Plath is standing in her vegetable garden. It’s a warm summer evening in Devon. In her arms she holds a great bundle of loose papers. At her feet, a bonfire blazes. While her mother and her daughter watch from the kitchen, she tears up page after page of writing. Leaning over the bonfire, she sets the papers alight and watches them burn.
As far as we know, this really did happen – in July of 1962, the year that Plath wrote many of her most famous poems. But the details are hazy. Depending on who you believe, the papers she held in her arms that day were either: love letters between Plath’s husband Ted Hughes and another woman; drafts of Hughes’s poems; bits of Hughes’s hair and skin scraped from his office desk; all of Plath’s letters from her mother; the entire manuscript of an unpublished Plath novel – or a combination of all the above.
Biographers argue over whether the burning was an act of jealous hurt, vindictive rage, mourning, or even witchcraft. For some, it is lit