Last summer, I had the opportunity to visit the homes in which Anne Sexton lived in Newton Lower Falls and Weston, Massachusetts. As my friend and I arrived, the owner of the second come greeted us with stories about the original condition of the home and Diane Middlebrook's visit for her biography. The house has since been renovated, with a large addition, but Sexton's study, which she shared with the family den, is still visible. I discuss Sexton's addition of her the study to her first home in my forthcoming book Annotating Modernism: Marginalia and Pedagogy from Virginia Woolf to the Confessional Poets (2015). For an earlier view of the second house, see the video of Sexton at home. To read more about the houses, you can also check out Sexton's Self-Portrait in Letters. The First Home, Newton (1953-1965)The Second Home, Weston (1965-1974)
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I am pleased to announce that I have been elected to the MLA Discussion Group on Bibliography and Textual Studies Executive Committee. I look forward to serving on the committee from 2015 to 2020.
My essay, "'The Woolf Sting': Sylvia Plath Annotating Virginia Woolf," is in Kathryn Artuso's collection, Virginia Woolf & 20th Century Women Writers. On July 18, 1957, during Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’s vacation on Cape Cod before moving to Northampton, Massachusetts, where Plath would begin teaching first-year English at her alma mater Smith College, she cryptically recorded in her journal: “the Woolf sting in Jacob’s Room put off” (Unabridged Journals 287). Here, Plath’s use of “sting” suggests a heist, but partly because her father studied bees, both bees and stings are also prominent in Plath’s poetic vocabulary. This essay examines Plath's personal copies of Woolf's books, housed at Smith College and Emory University, to address the ways that Woolf continues to have a sting and a significance to which Plath returns throughout her career. As she underlines and annotates Woolf’s pages, Plath seizes Woolf’s words and phrases, claiming them as her own. In addition to recording Plath’s engagement with Woolf’s language, the archive of Plath’s reading of Woolf provides a record that enables further understanding of the materiality of literary history, which is central to Woolf’s argument in A Room of One’s Own. |