For All Things Yale: "The Yale Diaries"

Have a rewarding All Saints' or Samhain.

I was asked to see Aurelia Plath's estate in 2018 because no one else cared. How times have changed. Yale University's Beinecke Library staff says the Aurelia Plath and Warren Plath estates should open in its rare book room in December. I'm so excited I already want to post my plans and when I get there tell you what I see.

While this every-Tuesday blogspot continues, for all things Beinecke I wanted you with me on 1) a research diary/journal format 2) with no ads and free of charge 3) and video/audio and comment-friendly. I chose Substack for "The Yale Diaries." Free subscribers get posts emailed but they must register, and please know that in archive-induced ecstasy I might post at all hours and five times a day.

These new Plath Family collections have potential to radically alter Plath studies. Ten days in New Haven is costly and by choosing a suburban motel I cut lodging by half but this raised the cost of transportation to and from campus. So just this once in this blog's history, there's a donate button. Any amount will be heartening, but more valuable yet would be your encouragement.

To curry Sylvia Plath's favor I launched "The Yale Diaries" on her birthday. May it work as promised.

I've already posted the first entries at theyalediaries.substack.com. Or type that URL into the search bar. The Yale Diaries site is too recent to appear as yet in Google search results. I will look into posting a link on this sidebar. 

Thank you for joining your researcher on Plath studies' final frontier. -Catherine

Aurelia Plath's Shorthand Transcriptions Have a Home

Aurelia Plath's shorthand annotations on the Lilly Library materials, cataloged and transcribed, are now available to all on the open-scholarship platform at Marquette University (my alma mater). The Excel files and short "keys" to each (PDFs) can be accessed and downloaded here. Take your time; there's a lot.

Marquette University Libraries digital librarian Heather James, herself a poet and Plath fan, welcomed the Aurelia Plath materials and skillfully uploaded the files. You must agree the Excel files are handsome and easy to use. Please credit Catherine Rankovic when referencing my work in your work. The Estate of Aurelia S. Plath granted me permission to release these transcriptions for scholarly purposes. Contact me at aureliascholar [at] gmail.com with questions re the shorthand.

Peter K. Steinberg kindly published a notice on his SylviaPlath.info blog that this project was ready.
 
I'm grateful that this project chose me. Currently I'm creating a chronology of Aurelia's life, gathering biographical information from every available source. It bears saying (because I've never heard it said) that Aurelia is an important key to Sylvia.

Plath Conference in Belfast in November 2017

I completed the Aurelia Plath shorthand project in February; it had taken another trip to Bloomington's Lilly Library, last September, to double-check all the correspondence in the Plath mss. II Boxes 1 through 6a.

On April 15, Mrs. Plath's estate granted me permission to use the findings for scholarship. Now I feel completely free to write. November's Sylvia Plath Conference in Belfast will coincide with the publication of The Complete Letters of Sylvia Plath and I will be presenting a paper there about Mrs. Plath's shorthand annotations, which I call "metadata," on said correspondence.

Conference information: Sylvia Plath Conference: Words, Letters and Fragments, at Ulster University, Belfast, November 10-11, 2017. Website here. Twitter: @plathconference. There's also a Facebook page.