PLATH, Sylvia.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Typed letter signed, to Ted Hughes. An extraordinary, long letter to Ted Hughes, announcing Plath's discovery of the poetry competition that would make his name. Plath recounts her previous evening's attendance at a sherry reception at the Union, something she had not been looking forward to. She sketches the venue - "white plaster and dark beams, very fine inner room" - and speaks to "various vintage toothy English women" and a gang of American students she had previously met but can't now remember. "I managed my usual story of being a cretin about remembering names and places." "All the time some Machiavellian little part of me was sitting in a corner scribbling notes and laughing and laughing; it is so strange now, to me - my social self is no longer all of me thrown out on a long leash and sniffing about enthusiastically - it is seated way deep down and doesn't give itself or commit itself, but watches and notes, and manages this other part which talks and gestures."Plath is then "invited to dinner by the queerest British couple yet". John Press works for the British Council and has published poems. "His strange big soft towering wife... looks like his mother and wears no ring and has graying hair".Press was an important figure in post-war British literary and artistic circles. He gossips to Plath about the marital affairs of the literati, including Auden, MacNeice, Spender, and Kathleen Raine. "I have never heard such a fascinating and disgusting story: they are all link

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.