Plath’s only novel was published 50 years ago this week, under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas” (those copies must be worth a pretty penny now). The Atlantic does a slideshow of different covers.
(I reread it a year or two ago, and it held up better than I’d expected it would. Sharp and funny.)
February 11 will also be 50 years since her suicide, and I think we have some new biographies on the way; it will be interesting to see how the absence of Ted Hughes, to say nothing of his sister Olwyn, affects their content.
CORRECTION: I had thought Olwyn was dead, but that was just wishful thinking. (Via.)
She had a great voice too.
Can’t get that to play, Phil. I used to have a cassette of her reading “Lady Lazarus” and poems written around that time; the radio program was so soon after their writing that she didn’t have “Lady Lazarus” in its final form yet. Al Alvarez talked her into cutting a line or two.
Try it again when you get to a different computer, b/c it plays on here for me. This version of LL and Daddy are part of the fine Poetry Speaks, collection of readings from Robert Browning, Whitman, Eliot, Sexton, Stafford, and others. Pound’s voice, like Plath’s, compliments the words as well as can be.
Order it from Lemuria if they don’t already have it.
I remember asking a guy at an airport bar once if he was from England. Nope, Boston. I clearly don’t have too much of an ear for accents, but I heard her and immediately thought it a very upper class British accent. Nope, Boston apparently.
There must be some huge class differences in Boston, because the city sure produces some varying accents. Her accent seem to me to be far more refined that the Kennedy accent, for example. (Not that my accept is considered “refined” at all!).
I’ve heard Plath read some earlier poems, and her accent was more Bostonian. The combo with her expat living in England is a real doozy.
Finally had the sense to try the video out on my phone. That’s the only recording of her reading “Lady Lazarus,” which she’d completed only two or three days previously; Alvarez told her to take out “I may be Japanese,” which doesn’t appear in the published version.
For Feb. 11, I’ll have to post on what Ted Hughes did with her manuscript of Ariel.