Sylvia, the Ghost Writer
.
Sylvia Plath was born near Boston on the 27 October 1932 and died by self-inflicted gas asphyxiation in Primrose Hill, London, on the 11 February 1963, sixty-three years ago this year. Those are the plain, earthly facts.
Plath’s literary output is likewise concrete. Somewhere, at some hour, it must have an end, although archivist and editor Peter K. Steinberg gathered enough fresh work to give readers The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath, an anthology that contains The Bell Jar author’s unfinished short stories and essays, as well as Plath’s book reviews for academic journals and early pieces of lifestyle journalism tailored for Vogue and Seventeen magazines.
That was in September 2024. Nine months later, in June 2025, Faber also delivered a flurry of anniversary editions of Ariel to mark year sixty of Plath’s essential poetic work. These attractive books, their covers designed in vintage shades of mint-and-black and Klee red, belong to the separate, vigorous life of Plathian reissues, analytic essays and tiny and mighty biographies extant.
The latter concern, a real cottage industry, is so robust it includes a book not only for every taste but for a generous range of attention spans. In 1973, Plath’s former college roommate Nancy Hunter Steiner gave us A Closer Look at Ariel: A Memory of Sylvia Plath, a gossipy one-sit read at eighty-eight pages. At the other end there’s Heather Clark’s thick triumph Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath: it came out in 2020, clocks in at more than one thousand meticulously researched pages and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize.
Red Comet should have been the last word on the writer’s life and art, but Carl Rollyson (to name just one biographer) has contributed four books to the Plath canon in only the last six years. Even Plath’s ‘new’ material isn’t as endangered as her fans might fear. This very spring, Faber is gathering hardcover pre-orders for The Poems of Sylvia Plath. Edited by Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil, the anthology, with its amusingly ex post facto title, is touted as containing twice as much verse as the once-seminal Collected Poems.
*
Mademoiselle was a once-significant young-women’s periodical that, in its best years, breezily meshed elite literary content with fashion and lifestyle copy. It published the likes of Dylan Thomas, William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, and propelled Truman Capote’s literary career, printing his debut short story ‘Miriam’ in 1945. The magazine was launched in New York in the middle of the Great Depression and shuttered a few weeks after the 11 September attacks in 2001.
It is rather easy for ephemerists to ferret out the earliest Mademoiselles of the 1930s on eBay. A hard-copy edition of the Plath-haunted College Issue circa 1953, however, has become a seriously endangered commodity.
Due to a diligent search, or perhaps divine luck, I happened to find one.
Eighteen months ago, burrowing deep online, I acquired a bound volume of five Mademoiselles as part of an apparent library closeout. Besides the loaded-in-every-way College Issue, the volume includes the 1953 issues of June, September, November and December. Literary gems lurk everywhere in these pages: the holiday edition, for example, includes an illustrated original essay by Southern Gothic author Carson McCullers.
But the College Issue is the blueprint of the Plath mystique and possibly, by extension, the whole genre of postwar confessional poetics. It is the physical manifestation of Plath’s time in Manhattan in June 1953, a month poisoned by overwork and overwhelm – plus literal food poisoning, thanks to a careless ad-agency lunch – that led to her first chronicled major depressive episode.
Six weeks later, broken by insomnia and brutally administered electric-shock treatments and emotionally paralysed by the challenges of her looming fall semester at Smith College, Plath took an overdose of sleeping pills and hid in the basement crawlspace of her family home, intending to die. She survived, and on the largesse of her author benefactor Olive Higgins Prouty, was institutionalised at private McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, through the end of the year. The poet’s mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, later characterised the period as an ‘agonizing six months of breakdown’. It was the experience Plath fictionalised, barely, in The Bell Jar.
Unaware of the volume’s literary value, the seller was marketing the Mademoiselles for their wealth of midcentury kitsch, and the novel-length August College Issue, stuffed overwhelmingly with silly, severe corset ads, delivers handsomely in this quarter. ‘Open Letter to a Man with a Crew Cut’ is not a letter but an eight-page fashion spread; by comparison, ‘Poets on Campus’, bylined by Plath and listed in the table of contents as a feature, comprises two pages of dryly transcribed quotes culled from a handful of teaching male poets, among them Richard Wilbur, then assistant professor of English at Harvard University.
You have to look carefully, within these three hundred and eighty-four pages, and you have to know what you are looking for, to find the iconic Plath content: the photo where she’s being ordered, against a flood of tears, to pose with a long-stemmed rose – later a key scene in The Bell Jar – or the snap of her hatted-and-gloved interview with Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen (she’d tried, desperately and unsuccessfully, to be assigned to Dylan Thomas). In the smudgy group picture later cropped to appear in countless Plath biographies, her amiable squint visible at the top of a human star formation of fellow guest editors suggests little of what she was feeling: the social and professional turmoil, the disillusionment with urban excess and slick Mad Men-era hustle. If anything, her smile appears more natural than the stiff, lipsticked feints of her peers corralled just below her.
As far as my research could uncover, the last 1953 August College Issue of Mademoiselle available on the open market was sold in 2018, for an undisclosed amount. For a while, then, I was pretty attached to this treasure I scored for less than £50. It was surreal to have the rare volume in my hands, the magazine pages as thin as dead skin and ready to rip under anything but the tenderest of treatment.
But a catalogue of financial woes, some prosaic, others unprecedented, eventually lessened my emotional hold on it. These incidents ranged from uninsured dental surgery to the lower half of my small house in Asheville, North Carolina, being washed away by the monster storm Helene on the 27 September 2024. I’ve worked as a regional journalist since the late 1990s, editing multiple publications at once during some boom years, so I can attest that print media wasn’t doing so well even before my mountain town took a titanic weather hit. It’s ironic, then, that I began venturing into the rare-manuscript world expecting a handsome windfall from any set of magazines, vintage or otherwise.
Still, Plathobiblia being what it is, at least one auction house with whom I listed the volume predicted a bidding war. I set my amount based on the hammer price of similar literary lots, then gradually lowered it, but nothing took. In fact, my Mademoiselles didn’t even rise to reserve price, and the bundle was returned to me with the marketplace equivalent of a shrug.
Despite my continued efforts – including sending mincing DMs to the admins of Plath-themed social-media platforms – and despite spikes of excitement expressed by book buyers on two continents, the heavy quarry has continually been turned down. One guess for its failure to sell is the cardboard clothette that binds the magazines: it is worn, and certainly not pretty, although it still smells pricelessly of old libraries.
But life pushes on, as does Plath’s cult of perpetuity. As we head into April, anticipation is high for the shower of new books. Simon & Schuster just released The Daffodil Days: the first novel by English journalist Helen Bain, it reimagines Plath’s brief stint at Court Green, the house in Devon she shared with her poet husband from Yorkshire, Ted Hughes, their infant son, who was born there, and their toddler daughter. The Poems of Sylvia Plath is next, due the 7 May. And in America, April is National Poetry Month, an occasion for Plath content like no other.
In a letter to her mother, Sylvia Plath once referred to April as ‘The Plath Month’ due to the meaningful prevalence of family birthdays occurring within those thirty days. Plath and Hughes believed in and practised astrology, and the couple tinkered with a ouija board as naturally as they might a newfangled kitchen appliance – ‘more fun than a movie’, she noted in her journals – and frequently consulted Plath’s tarot pack to sort out professional and logistical challenges in their lives. Their interest in magic was both literary and literal, and in her academic monograph Sylvia Plath and the Supernatural, released in February by Cambridge University Press, researcher and tutor Dorka Tamás notes that the same tarot pack sold through Sotheby’s, in 2021, for a news-making £151,200.
That’s almost four times the price – £44,000 – fetched by the April 1962 photo album showing Plath with her baby children outside Court Green, sitting in the golden sea of daffodils that inspired Bain’s new book. It’s fifteen times higher than the lure of Plath’s dragon pendant, a heavy, anachronistically gothic piece that lay against her heart in numerous well-known pictures; the necklace closed at £10,000. And it’s fifty times the value of the tartan wool skirt Plath sported as a Smith College undergraduate and, later, as a très typical American in Paris: her companion Gordon Lameyer snapped a picture of her wearing it there, Notre-Dame Cathedral looming in the background, in April 1956. Bonham’s auctioned that item for less than £3,000.
This unloading of rare manuscripts and personal effects came via Frieda Hughes, but not even Ted and Sylvia’s wedding rings or love letters approached the success of the anonymously purchased set of illustrated divination cards. As Tamás writes in Supernatural, ‘numerous articles tried to understand why such a haunted item – which Plath received for her twenty-fourth birthday from Ted Hughes – would be the most expensive piece to be sold’. The author points out that the tarot pack is mentioned in Plath’s arguably most well-known poem, ‘Daddy’, and that the cards’ exhilarating hammer price ‘exposed the ongoing interest from scholars and members of the general public to collectors in Plath’s affiliations with ritualistic performances of magic’.
That ‘general public’, whom I translate as today’s online torchbearers, keep the Plath mystique alive on an almost daily basis, announcing new books and posting every anniversary date with equal emotional gravity. An example is the 25 February, the night Sylvia and Ted clinched literary fate at a boozy launch party for a student literary magazine – an occasion of such chemistry that, according to legend, they fell to kissing violently within minutes of meeting one another.
There’s no doubt that today’s myth keepers are sincere. But Plath was a scholar first. A Fulbright recipient with a tested IQ of one hundred and sixty, she was conversant with real (that is to say ancient) myth long before she joined a select group of postgraduates studying at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, in the mid-fifties. Tamás writes:
‘From an early age, Plath employed classical mythology in her poetry, such as in her 1949 poem ‘To Ariadne (deserted by Theseus)’, anticipating the influence of classical stories on mistreated women with ambiguous power relations in, for example, ‘Electra on Azalea Path’, ‘Virgin in a Tree’ and ‘Edge’.’
‘Electra’ is an obvious reference to Greek mythology’s most vengeful daughter, and ‘Azalea Path’ is the actual name of a cemetery lane in Winthrop, Massachusetts, the burying place from where Plath’s domineering German father Otto Plath – the subject of ‘Daddy’ – wielded mythical power over the majority of his daughter’s earthly life, having died when she was only eight. Brandishing double potency, ‘Azalea Path’ is also an arch near-homonym of the poet’s mother’s married name, Aurelia Plath.
‘In her Ariel poems,’ writes Tamás, ‘[Plath] often narrates a poetic reclamation of the female body and autonomy through the supernatural transformations of her heroines. … Her writings show her well-informed knowledge of beliefs about witches and shapeshifting creatures.’ Sylvia Plath and the Supernatural frequently mentions ‘Goatsucker’, a lesser-known Plath poem about a mythological Greek bird, something like a vampire bat or an unusually ambitious parasitic insect, said to nurse from the udders of dairy goats after dark. Set against Daphne and Ariadne and Persephone and their ilk, the name ‘Goatsucker’ is a rude and wonderfully modern-sounding surprise. One might expect to have seen it first on a small-town band flyer, not printed on papyrus.
Heading from the barn back into the canon, Tamás, in the chapter ‘Shakespearean Maternal and Paternal Magic in Plath’s Poetry’, discusses ‘The Disquieting Muses’, a work Plath read on the BBC in 1961. In it, three grotesquely animated figures, each one ‘mouthless, eyeless, with stitched bald head’, haunt the narrator’s bed. Depicted as being similar to a dressmaker’s mute cloth mannequins, albeit animated with a voodoo-like power, they are also, as the poet herself revealed on air, stand-ins for Macbeth’s immortal cauldron stirrers. ‘[Plath]’s identification of the female figures with other “sinister trios” aligns with the interpretation that questions whether the Weird Sisters are witches or, rather, an embodiment of metaphysical evil and goddess-like creatures who influence the Macbeth’s and her poetic speaker’s destiny,’ notes Tamás.
A few years before ‘Muses’, Plath was meddling with a far less menacing figure: the tree nymph. ‘On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad’ showcases Plath’s sorely under-appreciated sense of humour in its very title; the speaker goes on to lament:
However I wrench obstinate bark and trunk
To my sweet will, no luminous shape
Steps out radiant in limb, eye, lip,
To hoodwink the honest earth which pointblank
Spurns such fiction
As nymphs; cold vision
Will have no counterfeit
Palmed off on it.
*
As the last poem Sylvia Plath is said to have written, ‘Edge’ from Ariel has had its verses name-checked in pop music – Lana Del Rey, The Replacements’ Paul Westerberg – and is also a must-mention piece for its elementary mythological allusion. Here, myth is stripped down to plain language, no interpretation required. The first half of the short poem tells us that:
The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
‘Edge’ comes to the reader like a rapid-reaction dispatch from an extraterrestrial realm – not just a suicide note of advanced craft, but a piece of backdated prophecy. The poem is deceptively simple. It is in full view, and it is final. No secrets here: the voice, common to the accusatory tone found throughout Ariel, is as exposing as it is exposed.
A more muffled cry for myth and magic occurs in the final pages of the 1953 August College Issue of Mademoiselle, in a poem that deals out such allegorical creatures as seraphim, ‘Satan’s men’ and a thunderbird. Plath’s dark, prancing villanelle ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’ debuted there on page three hundred and fifty-eight. For some reason, it is listed in the table of contents under ‘Fiction’. Its obscure placement so far back in the magazine is puzzling, too. After all, it wasn’t Plath’s first publication in Mademoiselle. Her prizewinning short story ‘Sunday at the Mintons’’, published in the College Issue exactly one year before, certainly helped secure her guest editorship.
Biblical and Native American references aside, the tone of ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’ comes off less intellectual than infatuated. Here the tone is breathless – indeed somewhat mad. And overall young.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed.
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
If my personal College Issue as a whole emits a strange, sulky aliveness, then ‘Mad Girl’ in its mystifying original setting is an outright chimera of atmosphere.
Sylvia Plath loathed working at Mademoiselle, a fact practically as well documented as her birth and her death. Beyond The Bell Jar, Elizabeth Winder’s Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953, with its exhaustive interviewing of the poet’s by-then-elderly magazine co-workers, provided an abundance of extra proof.
So if I can’t get a good price for my coveted set of magazines, who’s to say Plath’s ghost is not behind it somehow? If she’s tampering with me and my middlebrow money-grubbing from some supernatural plane, perhaps it’s just another chore to check off for the overachiever who once journaled, ‘What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless.’
I do move the volume around from time to time, wondering whether a resting place matters in these haunted times. Right now it lives on the lower shelf of a scarred but authentic Stickley wooden cocktail table, nestled between a pair of retro-style headphones and a stack of field guides outlining the resilient flora and fauna of the billion-year-old Blue Ridge Mountains.
.
.
Sylvia Plath in 1953. © estate of Myron Lotz, used courtesy Peter K. Steinberg
Melanie McGee Bianchi is a features editor from Asheville, North Carolina, in the American mountain South. She is also a fiction writer whose award-winning work has appeared in publications ranging from The Mississippi Review Summer Prize Issue to The Irish Times online. Melanie has written music features and personal essays for Oxford American magazine. Her short-story collection ‘The Ballad of Cherrystoke and Other Stories’ was released on Blackwater Press in 2022, and her first novel is inspired by a teenaged stint living in the haunted historic district of St. Augustine, Florida.
To discover more content exclusive to our print and digital editions, subscribe here to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.