by Sylvia Plath
*‘I found LORD BYRON’S WIFE far and away the most important of that lot you sent, so stole the 300 words or so you said I could take for one of the others & added them to this as well. I hope that is okay.’ appears in the original.
*During her third year (1952–3) at Smith College, SP completed English 39b (Milton) taught by Eleanor Terry Lincoln.
*SP moved to 23 Fitzroy Road on Monday 10 December.
*According to SP’s Letts Royal Office Diary Tablet for 1962, she may have travelled to London on 3 December. On 4 December she had a meeting regarding the Stevenage reading and had lunch in Leicester Square. Dense smog covered large parts of England during the week of 3 December 1962.
*Nicholas Frankfort (1962– ) and Sebastian Secker-Walker (1962– ).
*Probably Elizabeth Anderson (Heinemann) to SP, 10 December 1962; held by Smith College; regarding sending The Bell Jar to Elizabeth Lawrence at Harper & Row in New York. SP also received a letter from David Machin (Heinemann), 12 December 1962; held by Smith College. Sent to Court Green, Machin enclosed an advance copy of The Bell Jar.
*This broadcast never took place, but SP included the following poems: ‘The Applicant’, ‘Fog Sheep’ [‘Sheep in Fog’], ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘Ariel’, ‘Death & Co.’, ‘Nick and the Candlestick’, ‘Letter in November’, ‘Daddy’, ‘Fever 103°’, ‘The Bee Meeting’, ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’, and ‘Wintering’; a complete script held by British Library; an incomplete script held by Smith College.
*See Douglas Cleverdon to SP, 11 December 1962; held by Smith College.
*See SP to R. G. Walford, 14 December 1962; held by BBC Written Archives Centre.
*See ASP to SP, 4 December 1962; held by Smith College.
*See SP to Gilbert and Marian Foster, 15 December 1962.
*Since writing to ASP on 19 November, SP had completed: ‘Winter Trees’ (26 November); ‘Brasilia’ and ‘Childless Woman’ (1 December); and wrote the first version of ‘Sheep in Fog’ (2 December; revised 28 January 1963). ‘Years’, ‘The Fearful’, and ‘Mary’s Song’ may have been considered as the start of SP’s third poetry collection.
*Smith College holds SP’s chequebook stub indicating she paid £16. 5. 0 for the cooker on 12 December 1962.
*A portion of this letter is torn away. The text appearing in < > is from Letters Home.
*Head of BBC copyright.
*Date supplied from internal evidence.
*Christmas card of ‘The Messenger . . . from a painting contributed to UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, by Arnold Blanch of the United States of America.’
*Douglas Cleverdon to SP, 12 December 1962; held by Smith College.
*Sylvia Plath, ‘Stopped Dead’ and ‘The Applicant’, London Magazine 2 (January 1963): 14–16. See Alan Ross to SP, 2 November 1962; held by Smith College.
*James Bennett, a local builder.
*SP sent the Fosters a cheque for £15. Marian Foster recalls that they did not cash the cheque as they felt SP’s generous offer to help themselves to her store of onions, potatoes, and apples was more than fair compensation for taking care of the cats.
*The clipping, with pencil annotations by Prouty, is held by Lilly Library.
*Probably Olive Higgins Prouty to SP, 27 November 1962; held by Smith College.
*See Howard Moss to SP, 7 December 1962; held by New York Public Library.
*Howard Moss to SP, 30 November 1962; held by New York Public Library. Sylvia Plath, ‘Amnesiac’, New Yorker (3 August 1963): 29.
*Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt (1867). SP read Peer Gynt in November 1955. See SP to ASP, 21 November 1955 (Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol. 1, 1013).
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Written on an Arnold Blanch UNICEF Christmas card.
*The photographs are no longer with the letter.
*According to SP’s Letts Royal Office Diary Tablet for 1962, she visited St Ives on 13 November 1962; there is no evidence to support a visit in December.
*The glass-topped table appeared at auction via Bonhams on 21 March 2018.
*Dickins & Jones, Regent Street, London.
*SP saw Ingmar Bergman, Through a Glass Darkly, at the Cameo-Polytechnic Cinema, 307 Regent Street, on 20 December 1962.
*Sylvia Plath, ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’ and ‘Wintering’, Atlantic Monthly 211 (April 1963): 70–1. See Peter Davison to SP, 20 November 1962; held by Smith College. See also Atlantic Monthly to SP, 4 December 1962; held by Yale University.
*According to SP’s Letts Royal Office Diary Tablet for 1962, this was Dibby’s on Regent’s Park Road. Most likely in a block of houses called Regent’s Park Gardens on Regent’s Park Road that were demolished in 1963. Lorna Secker-Walker recalls that, over the course of several years, Dibby’s had various addresses in Primrose Hill, including a location on Primrose Hill Road which was also demolished in the 1960s. Nicholas Frankfort recalls attending Dibby’s on Princess Street.
*Robert McCloskey, Make Way for Ducklings (1941).
*See Douglas Cleverdon to SP, 20 December 1962; held by Smith College.
*Astrid Lindgren and Harald Wiberg, The Tomten (London: Constable, 1962); adapted from a poem by Viktor Rydberg.
*According to SP’s Letts Royal Office Diary Tablet for 1962, she saw Dr Horder on 28 December to discuss ‘Nick’s eye’, ‘Sleeping pills’, and ‘weight’.
*Art historian Henriette Antonia Groenewegen-Frankfort (1896–1982).
*TH lived for a period at Dido Merwin’s mother’s flat at 17 Montagu Square, London W.1.
*After SP’s last letter to Fainlight on 20 November 1962, and her move to London on 10 December, two additional prisoners escaped from HM Prison Dartmoor on 21 December 1962.
*For example, see ‘More blizzards on the Way’, The Guardian (2 January 1963): 1.
*Sylvia Plath, review of Contemporary American Poetry edited by Donald Hall; New Comment, BBC Third Programme (10 January 1963). SP’s copy of Contemporary American Poetry is held by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and includes her autograph and address in black ink on the half-title page with her underlinings and markings throughout the text. A date of ‘10–1–62’ is written in pencil in a different hand above Plath’s name. The writer of this date may have mistakenly written ‘62’ rather than ‘63’.
*According to SP’s Letts Royal Office Diary Tablet for 1962, SP went to University College Hospital for a chest x-ray on 1 January 1963.
*A reference to Hamlet’s famous speech in Act III, Scene I of Hamlet. Underlined in SP’s copy of The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942); held by Smith College.
*Date supplied from internal evidence.
*According to SP’s submissions list, she sent ‘An Appearance’, ‘The Bee Meeting’, ‘Years’, ‘The Fearful’, ‘Mary’s Song’, ‘Stings’, ‘Letter in November’, ‘The Couriers’, ‘The Night Dances’, ‘Gulliver’, ‘Cut’, and ‘Berck-Plage’ on 17 January 1963. She annotated the list on 25 January indicating that nine poems were accepted. See Charles Osborne, undated (c. 24 January 1963); held by Smith College. Sylvia Plath, ‘The Bee Meeting’, ‘Stings’, ‘Cut’, ‘Letter in November’, ‘The Couriers’, ‘Mary’s Song’, and ‘Years’, London Magazine 3 (April 1963): 24–32; ‘Berck-Plage’, London Magazine (June 1963): 26–31. Although SP underlined ‘An Appearance’ on her submission list – her usual practice in recording acceptances – it was not published in the London Magazine.
*A note on the letter indicates a response was sent on Friday 11 January 1963.
*Date supplied from internal evidence.
*According to SP’s Letts Royal Office Diary Tablet for 1962, the Roches visited on Thursday 3 January 1963 at 1 o’clock.
*According to an unpublished work by Clarissa Roche, Plath lent her the proofs of The Bell Jar to read with a promise to send a signed volume when she received her author’s copies.
*SP probably completed ‘“America! America!”’ by c. 21–2
January 1963; see Bernard Hollowood to SP, 23 January 1963, accepting the piece; held by Smith College. Sylvia Plath, ‘“America! America!”’, Punch 244 (3 April 1963): 482–4.
*According to SP’s address book, TH had a flat at 110 Cleveland Street, London W.1.
*London County Council, Home Help Department, St Pancras Town Hall (now Camden Town Hall), Euston Road, London N.W.1.
*Possibly Mrs Catherine Vigors (1933–99), 31 Cathcart Street, London N.W.5; SP’s address book lists ‘Mrs. C. Vigors, Kentish Town’.
*Leonie Cohn to SP, 17 January 1963; held by BBC Written Archives Centre.
*The au pair was hired from the Anglo Continental Bureau, then at 148 Walton Street, London S.W.3. SP sent a cheque for £5. 6. 0 on 22 January 1963.
*See Sheila Grant to SP, 31 January 1963; held by BBC Written Archives Centre; and Leonie Cohn to SP, 8 February 1963; held by BBC Written Archives Centre and Smith College. The letter at Smith College, which is the one received by SP, includes a handwritten postscript lacking from that held by BBC Written Archives Centre.
*The bottom-right corner of this one-page letter has been torn off. The text appearing in < > in the last paragraph is from Letters Home. When the letter was transcribed c. 1974 it was intact, and at some point between then and 2013, when the letter was transcribed for this book, it was intentionally damaged, removing SP’s signature.
*The letter does not apparently survive. Probably prompted from the 19 January 1963 letter from Patricia Ehle Goodall (1929–2009) to the Nortons excerpted in Letters Home. SP hosted Goodall and her husband John Latimer Goodall (1929–2010) and their daughter Susan Goodall that day. SP went to dinner at the Goodalls’ residence at 189 Sussex Gardens, London W.2, on Friday 8 February 1963. Goodall was a cousin of Perry Norton’s first wife Shirley Baldwin Norton.
*Olive Higgins Prouty to SP, 25 January 1963; held by Smith College.
*See Philip French to SP, 21 January and 1 February 1963; held by BBC Written Archives Centre.
*Cf. Sylvia Plath, ‘Snow Blitz’.
*Written in the bottom left corner, presumably in Carey’s hand, is: ‘She died Feb. 11, 1963 R.I.P.’
*See Michael Carey to SP, 28 January 1963; held by Smith College.
*Since writing to Dorothy Benotti on 14 December, SP had revised ‘Sheep in Fog’ and completed ‘The Munich Mannequins’, ‘Totem’, and ‘Child’ (28 January); ‘Paralytic’ and ‘Gigolo’ (29 January); ‘Mystic’, ‘Kindness’, and ‘Words’ (1 February); and ‘Contusion’ (4 February). SP wrote ‘Edge’ and ‘Balloons’ the following day (5 February). In addition to ‘“America! America!”’, by 28 January SP had also completed two prose works: ‘Landscape of Childhood’ [‘Ocean 1212–W’] and ‘Snow Blitz’.
*The sender’s name and address is left blank on this aerogramme and the postmark reads: ‘LONDON N.W.1 / 1245 PM / 8 FEB / 1963’.
*Fromm writes on ‘idolatrous love’ in The Art of Loving, 99–100. On idolatrous love, which SP underlined and starred in her copy, Fromm states: ‘If a person has not reached the level where he has a sense of identity, of I-ness . . . he deprives himself of all sense of strength, loses himself in the loved one instead of finding himself’ (99).
*See Fromm, The Art of Loving, chapter IV, ‘The Practice of Love’, 107–33.
*Since publication on 14 January 1963, reviews of The Bell Jar appeared in Glasgow Herald (17 January), Oxford Mail (17 January), Time & Tide (17–23 January and 31 January), Evening Times (Glasgow, 18 January), Express & Star (19 January), The Times (24 January), New Statesman (25 January), Times Literary Supplement (25 January), Scotsman (26 January), Sphere (26 January), Sunday Telegraph (27 January), The Observer (27 January), Birmingham Post (29 January), The Listener (31 January), and The Guardian (1 February). It is not clear which reviews SP saw.
*Theodore Roethke, I Am Said the Lamb (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961).