Sylvia Plath: Drawings
About this ebook
Sylvia Plath: Drawings is a portfolio of pen-and-ink illustrations created during the transformative period spent at Cambridge University, when Plath met and secretly married poet Ted Hughes, and traveled with him to Paris and Spain on their honeymoon, years before she wrote her seminal work, The Bell Jar.
Throughout her life, Sylvia Plath cited art as her deepest source of inspiration. This collection sheds light on these key years in her life, capturing her exquisite observations of the world around her. It includes Plath’s drawings from England, France, Spain, and New England, featuring such subjects as Parisian rooftops, trees, and churches, as well as a portrait Ted Hughes.
Sylvia Plath: Drawings includes letters and diary entries that add depth and context to the great poet’s work, as well as an illuminating introduction by her daughter, Frieda Hughes.
This collection of art and writing offers a rare window into the poet’s life:
- A Poet’s Sketchbook: Dozens of detailed pen-and-ink drawings from her travels through England, France, and Spain, capturing everything from Parisian rooftops to a portrait of her new husband, Ted Hughes.
- Rare Personal Letters: Read Plath’s own words in correspondence from Cambridge, describing her passion for drawing and the evolution of her work in her own voice.
- Art and Literature: See how Plath’s visual imagination fueled her literary genius, creating a powerful dialogue between her sketches and her seminal works like The Bell Jar.
- An Intimate Introduction: Gain unique insight from an illuminating introduction by her daughter, Frieda Hughes, who shares the personal history of this treasured collection.
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About the author
Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. Her books include the poetry collections The Colossus, Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, Ariel, and Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize. A complete and uncut facsimile edition of Ariel was published in 2004 with her original selection and arrangement of poems. She was married to the poet Ted Hughes, with whom she had a daughter, Frieda, and a son, Nicholas. She died in London in 1963.
Born in London in 1960, Frieda Hughes is a painter and poet. She has also written children’s books, and was The Times (London) poetry columnist from 2006 to 2008. Frieda’s first collection of poetry, Wooroloo, was named after the hamlet in western Australia where she lived during the 1990s. Other collections followed: Stonepicker; Waxworks; Forty-five, a collection of autobiographical poems based on her life to the age of forty-five; The Book of Mirrors; and Alternative Values. In this last book, Frieda used the subject of her poems to inform the accompanying abstract images—painted in oils on canvas—combining the two driving forces in her life. Her poems have also appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The London Magazine, The Times (London), and The Spectator (London). Frieda resides in Wales with owls and motorbikes.
