by Sylvia Plath
*Typescript held by Lilly Library.
*Date supplied from internal evidence.
*Gordon Lameyer to SP, 23 April 1955; held by Lilly Library.
*Sylvia Plath, ‘Danse Macabre’ and ‘Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit’, Smith Review, Spring 1955, 12, 19–21.
*Mary Honan Nalieri (1915–74), lived at 6 Somerset Terrace, Winthrop, Mass.
*Father James Keller (1900–77); founder of the Christophers. See Father James Keller to SP, 26 April 1955, Sylvia Plath, Smith College scrapbook, p. 82; held by Lilly Library.
*Panda Prints Mother’s Day card designed by Rosalind Welcher.
*Emma M. Takacs (1923–90). Takacs married Robert Thornell (1921–2005) on 4 March 1942. Their three children were Colleen Marie (1945–2011), Russell E. (1946– ), and Susan (1949– ).
*SP participated in the 1st Annual English Festival at Onteora Central School, on 5 May 1955. SP’s programme from the festival held by Lilly Library.
*Wallace Klitgaard (1937–2006).
*Kaj Klitgaard (1883–1953).
*American painter Georgina B. Klitgaard (1893–1976).
*Writer Dachine Rainer (1921–2000); born Sylvia Newman. Rainer lived with the writer Holley Cantine.
*See SP’s Smith College scrapbook, p. 79; held by Lilly Library.
*Elizabeth Green was director of the News Bureau at Mount Holyoke College.
*Green to SP, 3 May 1955; held by Lilly Library.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Edward Weeks to SP, 20 May 1955; held by Lilly Library.
*Sylvia Plath, ‘Circus in Three Rings’, The Atlantic 196 (August 1955), 68.
*The ten poems were: ‘Prologue to Spring’, ‘Metamorphoses of the Moon’, ‘Winter Words’, ‘Ice Age’, ‘Lament’, ‘Epitaph in Three Parts’, ‘Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea’, ‘Moonsong at Morning’, ‘Love Is a Parallax’, and ‘Insolent Storm Strikes at the Skull’; held by Academy of American Poets, New York; copy with SP pseudonym ‘Robin Hunter’ held by Smith College.
*Date supplied by internal evidence.
*Date supplied from postmark; postmarked Long Island City, N.Y., 31 May 1955.
*A revival of the 1939 film played at the Plaza Theatre, then at 42 E. 58th Street, New York, from 10 May 1955.
*According to SP’s calendar, she saw this play on 27 May 1955. The Desperate Hours, adapted from the 1954 novel by Joseph Hayes, was performed at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47th Street, New York.
*According to SP’s calendar, she saw this on 28 May 1955, as well as the Rockettes, Love Me or Leave Me, and ‘Bolero’ at Radio City Music Hall, New York.
*Date supplied from internal evidence.
*Panda Prints birthday card designed by Rosalind Welcher.
*According to SP’s calendar, she read a selection of her poetry at the Smith Club Annual Meeting in Wellesley, on 26 May 1955.
*Date supplied from internal evidence.
*Enoch Harrison Eudy (1899–1965).
*Marie Bullock (1911–86); founder and president of the Academy of American Poets.
*Marie Bullock to SP, 2 June 1955; held by Lilly Library.
*Fashion designer and poet Mary Cummings Eudy (1874–1952).
*Mary Cummings Eudy, Quarried Crystals and Other Poems (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935); the location of SP’s copy is not known.
*Mary Cummings Eudy, Quicken the Current (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949); the location of SP’s copy is not known.
*Mary Cummings Eudy, ‘Radiation’, Quicken the Current, 74.
*According to handwritten annotations made to the letter by an Atlantic Monthly employee, the poems enclosed with ‘The Princess and the Goblins’ were: ‘Black Pine Tree in Orange Light’, ‘A Study in Sculptural Dimensions’ [‘Wayfaring at the Whitney: A Study in Sculptural Dimensions’], ‘Ice Age’, and ‘Moonsong at Morning’.
*Dylan Thomas, ‘Poem on His Birthday’; SP slightly misquotes: ‘He / In his slant racking house / And the hewn coils of his trade perceives / Herons walk in their shroud’.
*Sylvia Plath, ‘Temper of Time’, The Nation 181 (6 August 1955), 119. See Caroline Whitney to SP, 21 June 1955; held by Lilly Library.
*Grace E. Pulling, who lived at 19 Pine Plain Road, Wellesley. Married to Richard A. Pulling; mother of David and Lynda.
*Probably Thelma V. Hamm, a junior high school teacher who lived with her mother Charlotte C. Hamm at 27 Pine Plain Road, Wellesley.
*Probably Mary R. Geary, wife of Rex I. Geary, who lived at 1 Ingersoll Road, Wellesley.
*Probably Ruth Klauer, wife of Frederick J. Klauer, Jr, of 7 Ingersoll Road, Wellesley.
*Madeline Redmond Sheets (1905–2006). According to SP’s address book, Sheets lived at 1 Weld Road, Stoneham, Mass. Sheets was a trained nurse, see SP to ASP, 16 January 1960 (second letter).
*SP’s first passport, used 1955–7; held by Lilly Library. Her second passport, used 1959– 63, is held by Woodruff Library, Emory University.
*Neal’s of California, a clothing store for women then at 19 Arlington Street, Boston.
*A summer-season production performed at The Amphitheatre, Wellesley College. The productions in June and July 1955 included Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning, Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms, and Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2.
*Star Market, a grocery store then at 448 Washington Street, Wellesley.
*Sibyl Webb Dougherty (1891–1960); taught voice at Pine Manor Junior College, then in Wellesley.
*American poet and author Ruby Altizer Roberts (1907–2004).
*Gertrude Boatwright Claytor (1890?–1973); Claytor was on the advisory board of Lyric.
*According to SP’s calendar, she saw Tales of Hoffmann and Last Holiday, and had ice cream at Howard Johnson. The films showed at the Kenmore Theatre, then at 777 Beacon Street, Boston.
*According to SP’s calendar, she saw King Henry IV, Part 1 on 20 July 1955.
*According to SP’s calendar, she saw the film Svengali, visited the M.I.T. chapel and auditorium, and walked in the Public Garden. Svengali played at the Beacon Hill Theatre, then at 1 Beacon Street, Boston.
*According to SP’s calendar, she saw Henry IV, Part I at the Brattle Theatre. SP and Davison had dinner at Chez Dreyfus, then at 44 Church Street, Cambridge.
*Rhoda Mary Dorsey (1927–2014); B.A. 1949, history, Smith College; B.A. 1951, Newnham College, University of Cambridge.
*Sylvia Plath, ‘Tea With Olive Higgins Prouty’.
*Sylvia Plath, ‘Lament’, New Orleans Poetry Journal 1 (October 1955), 19.
*Sylvia Plath, ‘Apotheosis’ and ‘Second Winter’, Lyric 36 (Winter 1956), 10–11. Ruby Altizer Roberts to SP, 30 July 1955; held by Lilly Library.
*American poet Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929–2012); Rich’s first book A Change of World won the 1950 Yale Younger Poets Award, and was published by Yale University Press, 1951.
*Gordon Lameyer to SP, 14 July 1955; held by Lilly Library.
*According to SP’s calendar, Davison lived at 43 Bowdoin Street, Cambridge, Mass.
*Date supplied from internal evidence.
*Gordon Lameyer to SP, 31 July 1955; held by Lilly Library.
*Peter Davison. SP and Davison travelled to Martha’s Vineyard via Woods Hole and met, while awaiting the ferry, the Irish poet Padraic Colum (1881–1972) and his wife Mary (1884–1957).
*According to SP’s address book in her 1955 diary, the Plumers lived at 45 Linnean Street, Apartment B-2, Cambridge, Mass.
*Othello, directed by John Stix and starring William Marshall, played at the Brattle Theatre.
*The enclosure is no longer with the letter.
*Hurricane Connie made landfall in North Carolina on 12 August 1955.
*Padraic Colum, ‘The Book of Kells’, Atlantic Monthly 196 (July 1955), 53.
*The Landfall is a restaurant at 9 Luscombe Avenue, Woods Hole, Mass.
*The Barn-House is a seventeent
h-century building at 451 South Road, Chilmark. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in January 2012.
*Lewis Webster Jones (1899–1975) and Barbara Slatter Jones (b. 1902); Jones served as president 1951–8.
*Roy Lamson Jr (1908–86), professor of English and dean of freshmen, Williams College, 1938–57.
*Peggy Lamson (1912–96); married to Roy Lamson; author of ‘“You Shall Become a Man”: A mother who would not let her son die’, Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1955, 48–9, 86–8, 90, 93–4, 96–8, 100 (adapted from Simone Fabien, Tu seras un homme [1955]).
*According to SP’s calendar, their surname was Graf.
*Mary Ellen Chase to SP, 4 August 1955; held by Lilly Library.
*According to SP’s calendar, her suit was from C. Crawford Hollidge, then at 74 Central Street, Wellesley.
*Gordon Lameyer to SP, 8 and 9 August 1955; held by Lilly Library.
*Probably American politician and professor George C. Lodge (1927– ), son of United States Senator from Massachusetts Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr (1902–85).
*Lucinda Baker, ‘No Literary Slump for Lucinda’, The Writer’s 1955 Year Book 26 (Cincinnati, Ohio: F. & W. Publishing, 1955), 11–15; SP’s annotated copy held by Smith College; the text SP quotes appears on pp. 14–15.
*Letter misdated by SP.
*Probably Gordon Lameyer to SP, 16 August 1955; held by Lilly Library.
*Hurricane Diane made landfall at Wilmington, North Carolina on 17 August 1955, moving up the east coast and affecting Virginia and the mid-Atlantic states.
*Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881); Isabel Archer is a main character.
*Whitstead Hall, 4 Barton Road, Cambridge, is the residence for foreign students attending Newnham College, Cambridge University; SP lived there from October 1955 through early December 1956.
*The Fred Astaire Dance Studio was at 294 Boylston Street, Boston.
*According to SP’s calendar, this was Richard Roger Hanzel.
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Weller lived at 1514 26th Street NW, Washington, DC.
*Possibly Patrick A. Conmy (1934– ); B.A. 1955, Harvard University.
*American actress Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003) starred in the motion picture Summertime, which played at the DuPont Theater, then at 1322 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington, DC.
*SP’s calendar indicates she ate at Peter Pan; probably the Peter Pan Inn, then in Urbana, Maryland.
*The King and I, starring Patricia Morison and Leonard Graves, played at the National Theatre at 1321 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC, from 1 August 1955. There is no indication in SP’s calendar that she saw the performance.
*According to SP’s calendar, she stayed at the YWCA Holborn, Helen Graham House, 57 Great Russell Street, London.
*Carl M. Shakin (1934– ); B.S. 1955, New York University; Fulbright Fellow, University of Manchester, 1955–6; Ph.D. 1961, Harvard; escorted SP on the Cunard liner Queen Elizabeth and in Cherbourg and London, September 1955.
*According to SP’s calendar, she saw Rififi at the Curzon on 24 September 1955.
*According to SP’s calendar, she saw Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the Criterion Theatre on 20 September 1955.
*According to SP’s calendar, she saw Separate Tables at the St James’s Theatre on 24 September 1955.
*SP misnames the play. SP saw Norman King’s The Shadow of Doubt at the Saville Theatre on 22 September 1955.
*According to SP’s calendar, she saw Marcel Aymé’s The Count of Clérambard at the Garrick Theatre on 23 September 1955. The play was translated by Norman Denny.
*The Arts Theatre is at 6–7 Great Newport Street, London.
*Chez Auguste, a restaurant then at 38 Old Compton Street, London.
*British economist and journalist Geoffrey Crowther (1907–72); editor of The Economist 1938–56. This lecture took place on 21 September 1955.
*Margaret Alexander, Countess Alexander of Tunis (1905–77); the reception was at Dartmouth House, 37 Charles Street, Berkeley Square, London, on 21 September 1955.
*Scottish literary historian and literary critic David Daiches (1912–2005).
*English poet Sir Stephen Harold Spender (1909–95).
*English poet Rudolf John Frederick Lehmann (1907–87).
*English novelist Charles Percy Snow (1905–80).
*United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom Winthrop Williams Aldrich (1885– 1974).
*Barbara Woolworth Hutton (1912–79); Winfield House, Regent’s Park.
*According to SP’s calendar, this was John Clark.
*‘since I have am not’ appears in the original.
*According to SP’s calendar, during 20–7 September 1955 she saw The Remarkable Mr Pennypacker at the New Theatre on 26 September 1955 in addition to Waiting for Godot, The Shadow of Doubt, The Count of Clérambard, Separate Tables and The King and I.
*Foyle’s bookstore was at 119–125 Charing Cross Road (address from SP’s address book).
*Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881).
*Date supplied from postmark.
*Fictional Belgian detective created by Agatha Christie.
*‘and a few reprints’ appears in the original.
*Cecil Edward Clarabut and Kathleen Mary Clarabut, who lived, according to SP’s calendar, at 2 Highmore Road, Blackheath, London SE3.
*Mrs Milne was the housemother at Newnham.
*According to SP’s calendar, this was Jean Pollard (1933– ); B.S. 1954, Cape Town University; B.A. geography 1957, Newnham College, Cambridge.
*In addition to SP, the Newnham College Report for January 1956 lists the following Whitstead residents: Jane Baltzell (American), Kathleen Isabel Margaret Chesters (British), Marie Philippa Forder (South African), Renee Mary Elizabeth Kimber (American), Lois Marshall (American), Isabel Murray (Scottish), Jean Margaret Pollard (South African), Margaret Roberts (South African) and Evelyn Sladdin (British). Reminiscences by several Whitstead residents were published in Memories of Whitstead (2007). SP is mentioned in several: see Marie Philippa Forder Goold (27–31) and Jane Baltzell Kopp (39–45).
*According to SP’s calendar, this was David Allison; B.A. 1956, mathematics, King’s College, Cambridge.
*Renee Mary Elizabeth Kimber; research student in history, 1954–6 Newnham College, Cambridge.
*Kathleen Marguerite Passmore Burton (1921– ); lecturer in English, Newnham College, Cambridge, 1949–60; director of studies in English, 1952–60; SP’s director of studies and supervisor under whom she studied Tragedy and Practical Criticism.