Effects of Sylvia Plath Are On The Block

Plath’s vintage mint green Hermes 3000—with which she wrote The Bell Jar

The belongings of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes will go to auction in London at the end of this month. The personal collection includes rare books, manuscripts, and memorabilia.

Plath graduated first in her class at Bradford Senior High School in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1950.
According to her class yearbook, called The Wellesleyan, Plath was “clever with chalk and paints”
and a “future writer.” This yearbook is inscribed beside her photograph with a note to her pal, Patricia O’Neill:
“Dear Pat – Leaves & sun, pine needles and hamburgs – all this and the best friend a girl could ever have.”

Their daughter Frieda Hughes hopes the sale will “enable others to take on the preservation and enjoyment of these literary relics. In identifying which items to sell, I realised that much of what I owned, redolent of my parents’ joint history, told a story; one item made sense of other items—the books and the pamphlets and the poems, signed by my mother or father, represented important aspects of their literary lives and were evidence of their powerful partnership.”


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