Faber Reissues Sylvia Plath's Crossing the Water and Winter Trees

The Letters of Sylvia Plath may have dominated your attention this autumn, but Faber and Faber reissued two classic Sylvia Plath poetry books on 5 October: Crossing the Water and Winter Trees.

Both of these first appeared in England in 1971 and serve as a bridge of poems between The Colossus and Ariel to Plath's growing legions of readers and fans. The contents of these editions varies between England and the US and it is all really rather too involved to go into now for the purpose of this blog post, which is to encourage you to buy these two books!

Faber's reissue reset the text for both books and made other house-style changes such as, for example, bringing their covers up to their current design. They are gorgeously sleek and clean looking. You can see the historical covers over on my main website for Sylvia Plath, A celebration, this is.

One small change to note, though, involved updating the poem title of "Small Hours" to "Barren Woman". The poem was originally published as "Small Hours" in the London Magazine (August 1961) and later in the 1971 edition of Crossing the Water. However, in Plath's Collected Poems (1981) the title changed to "Barren Woman". At some point between its appearance in London Magazine and her death, Plath renamed "Small Hours" to "Barren Woman". The title change is reflected, Karen V. Kukil has observed, in the typescript of Ariel Plath prepared before her death.

You can buy both books on Faber's website, or via Amazon.co.uk (Crossing the Water and Winter Trees), and through other book retailers.

All links accessed: 17 and 18 October 2017.

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

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove

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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