A <a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/luxury/books-&amp;-manuscripts/book?Book%20Type=Signed%2520and%2520Inscribed" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">signed</a> manuscript of one of <a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/search?query=sylvia%20plath&amp;tab=objects&amp;sortBy=bsp_dotcom_prod_en" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Plath</a>'s earliest poems, in a version preceding the 1946 revision published in her junior high school literary magazine and collected nowhere else.<ul><li>Sylvia Plath (American).</li><li>[Wellesley, Massachusetts]: n.p, [circa 1945].&nbsp;</li><li>Single ruled leaf.</li><li>Handwritten in pencil in three stanzas, with title and "by Sylvia" above.</li><li>Housed in a custom gilt-stamped black cloth clamshell case with black leather spine.</li></ul> "The Snowflake Star" was one of a small cluster of early poems in which Plath first began experimenting with a group of images that would in many ways come to define her later work. In "A Winter Sunset," written around the same time (and published in the same issue of her junior high literary magazine The Phillipian), the moon hangs above "the bare, black skeletons of trees." And in "To Miss Cox," from later in 1946, "The winter skies are leaden / The flying snowflakes sting." Plath biographer Heather Clark identifies the beginnings of Plath's "mature poetic voice" in these poems, a voice also heard in "The Snowflake Star." Its opening lines ("On a dark and cloudy day / I wandered in the woods away") point, in all their simplicity, directly ahead to 1956, when Plath would write "I stalk like a rook, / brooding as the winter night comes on [...] Who'd walk in this bleak place?" ("Winter Landscape, With Rooks"); to 1960: "Winter dawn is the color of metal / The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves" ("Waking in Winter"); to 1962: "The woods are a well" ("Stars over the Dordogne"). "The Snowflake Star" revolves around subjects and images that would become enduring in her work: snow, winter, stars, trees. The list of poems in which these ideas are central is long and includes many of her best-known works: "Crossing the Water," "Words" ("fixed stars / Govern a life"), "Winter Trees," "Snow Blitz," "Wintering," "The Snowman on the Moor," "The Munich Mannequins" ("The snow has no voice"), "Winter Words," "To A Jilted Lover" ("a mosaic of stars / diagrams the falling years"), "Elm" — to name only a selection. Metrically precise and lettered in a dauntingly perfect hand, this three-stanza version of "Snowflake Star" was composed before the poet turned 14. Plath's juvenile diaries record that on January 10th, 1945, assigned to write a poem or story about a star, she wrote two: "King of the Ice," and "another even better 'The Snowflake Star.'" The poem was completed by February 21 of that year, but would not appear in The Phillipian until the following year (the only time it was published in any version), in February of 1946. Notably, scholar Edward Butscher's assessment of Plath's juvenilia quotes words and phrases not present in this sparer, starker draft: the "temporary return to strained gaiety and a continued pursuit of the conventional" characteristic of her other winter poems from the same period have not yet been written into the close of this version. Avoiding the "happy thought" which "lingers on" in the final stanza of the published version, this draft ends simply with the word "star," the poem's only unrhymed line, the snowflake just caught, still frozen, in the mittened hand — an ending more in keeping with Plath's later work, where danger always lurks just below the surface of beauty. Material of any kind entirely in Plath's hand is rare on the market. While typescripts of her poems appear from time to time (many submission copies to periodicals and publishers), almost all original handwritten drafts remained with Plath's papers (which now reside variously at Smith College, the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana, and Emory University). This manuscript, which originates with Plath's mother's estate, represents one of just a tiny handful of occasions when a handwritten poem of Plath's has come to market. A rare opportunity not only to own an original work in Plath's own hand, but one that prefigures many of her most important images and themes.

The Snowflake Star | Unpublished Poem

<a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/search?query=Sylvia%20Plath&amp;tab=objects&amp;sortBy=bsp_dotcom_prod_en" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Sylvia Plath</a>'s annotated copy of Tragedy Is Not Enough, read in her first year of study at Cambridge, with marginal notes connecting the text to her own 1953 breakdown immortalized in <a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/search?query=The%20Bell%20Jar&amp;tab=objects&amp;sortBy=bsp_dotcom_prod_en" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">The Bell Jar</a> and a prophetic description of Ariel as a poet.<ul><li>Karl Jaspers (German-Swiss).</li><li>Translated by Harald A.T. Reiche, Harry T. Moore, and Karl W. Deutsch.</li><li>London:&nbsp;Victor Gollancz Ltd,&nbsp;1953.</li><li>123 pages.</li><li>First United Kingdom edition.</li><li>Ownership inscription by Plath penned to front free endpaper: "Sylvia Plath / Cambridge / 1955."</li><li>Pen underlining and occasional marginalia by Plath throughout.</li><li>Several pages dog-eared (as was her practice).</li><li>Plath's bookplate, designed by Rockwell Kent and with her typed name, laid in.</li><li>Original blue cloth with gilt-lettered spine, in original unclipped (8/6) dust jacket.</li></ul> "[W]hat the hell is tragedy? I am." — Plath, Journals In 1955, barely two years removed from her catastrophic breakdown, 23-year-old Sylvia Plath enrolled at Newnham College, Cambridge on a Fulbright scholarship, eager to hurl herself at two thousand years of literature in a course of study she deliberately designed around her areas of least proficiency, seemingly tailor-made to aggravate any intellectual anxieties she brought with her and generate some new ones besides. "I would never have put a first-term student onto the Tragedy paper like that," her contemporary Jean Gooder later observed; "It was a crazy way to begin." In this book, Plath has left marginalia and ink trails of evidence for her progress through this formative first year at Cambridge. Plath's copy of Jaspers's Tragedy is filled with ink underlining, stars, and occasional notes. Above all, Plath seizes on every mention of "failure." Underlining Jaspers's suggestion that "even the experience of failure may be crucial," Plath writes in the margins "cf. August 1953" — the date of her first failed suicide attempt. Plath had famously spent June of 1953 in New York as a guest editor for Mademoiselle, returning home from a month of frantic alienation to learn of her rejection from Frank O'Connor's creative writing class at Harvard Summer School. Plath descended into panicky despair, what she recorded as "Fear of failing" (Journals). But the experience of failure — as Jaspers continues here and Plath's own pen follows — may bring with it "possibilities of restructuring [one's] own personality and the further pattern of [one's] life." Plath's intense pursuit of this possibilty was evident to her tutor Dorothea Krook: "I have seemed to recognize in her whole academic effort at Cambridge a great, perhaps even a titanic, struggle for 'normalcy' against the forces of disintegration within her." By 1958, married and degreed and still striving, "all itch and eager fury," she knew what she always had: "I am made crudely, for success." Another significant section marked by Plath is Jaspers's discussion of Shakespeare, specifically the role of his characters Prospero and Ariel — this read and underlined by Plath ten years before her Ariel. Prospero and Ariel represent, according to Jaspers, "the noble task" of the poet: "holding the mirror up to the world, of bearing witness to reality." Jaspers's conclusion argues that, to live a great and noble life is "to endure ambiguity in the movement of truth and to make light shine through it; to stand fast in uncertainty." "To endure ambiguity": Plath crowns this with a star, underlines it, and writes it over again.

Tragedy Is Not Enough | Sylvia Plath's Annotated Copy

A collection of more than three dozen magazine appearances by Plath, including the first appearance in print of "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus."<ul><li>Sold as a set of 41 magazines and literary journals.</li><li>Sylvia Plath (American).</li><li>Various publishers, 1957-1971.</li><li>All bound in their original wrappers.</li></ul> With 22 instances published during her lifetime (and five the year of her death), from such publications as The New Yorker, Poetry, The Atlantic and elsewhere. Besides "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" (in the October 1963 issue of THE REVIEW), highlights include nine appearances in The New Yorker, eight of which were published during her lifetime including the poems "Tulips (1962)," "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor (1958)" and "A Winter's Tale (1959)"; two poems in the June 1958 issue of The London Magazine ("Spinster" and "Black Rook in Rainy Weather"), that also includes Albert Camus' Nobel Prize acceptance speech; the posthumously published short story, "Johnny Panic and The Bible of Dreams" in the September 1968 issue of The Atlantic, nine years before it would be used as the title for a collection of Plath's short stories; and one posthumous appearance in a 1965 issue of Mademoiselle ("November Graveyard"), the magazine where she spent a month as guest editor after her third year of college and which provided many of the experiences she would later draw inspiration from while writing The Bell Jar. The earliest appearance is in the January 1957 issue of Poetry, which includes six poems, and the latest appearance is in Works In Progress No. 2, 1971, which includes four poems and a short story. An impressive collection of periodicals featuring appearances by one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, spanning Plath's start as a writer through her tragic death and early posthumous publications.

Collection of Magazine Appearances

A <a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/luxury/books-&amp;-manuscripts/book?locale=en&amp;Book%20Type=Signed%2520and%2520Inscribed" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">signed</a> letter from <a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/search?query=Sylvia%20Plath&amp;tab=objects&amp;sortBy=bsp_dotcom_prod_en" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Sylvia Plath</a> to her mother.<ul><li>Sylvia Plath (American).</li><li>One leaf, recto and verso, on light blue Smith College stationery.</li><li>Framed with contemporaneous black-and-white photograph of Plath.</li></ul> Sylvia Plath (1932–63) matriculated at Smith College in the fall of 1950, and quickly formed a tight bond with her roommate, Marcia Brown (1932–2012). In the winter of 1951, Plath and Brown visited the latter's maternal aunt, Harriet Bosworth, in Francestown, New Hampshire, a trip that clearly enthralled Plath, who writes in the first paragraph, "It is now midnight Sunday night and I have gotten back from the nicest weekend I ever had!" She continues: "Marcia and I got up at 10 and had a lovely liesurely [sic] breakfast in the front living room of the dear little house. Then we went out into the most beautiful world imagineable [sic]! Snow had fallen in a fine powder last night, and the sun was out in a snow-blue sky. A white-New-England church is so lovely — and it was one of those heavenly dry-cold days, with blinding sun and snow and sharp blue shadows. The air was swimmingly blue." Plath goes on to recount skiing for the first time — "I have never been so thrilled in my life!" — and while noting "the modest little gently rolling hill… was not Sun Valley," stated that, "Skiing, if you can do it well, must be pretty close to feeling like God." She closes with, "to bed &amp; my six hour day tomorrow — your happy girl, Sylvia." Plath and Brown maintained their close friendship until Sylvia's suicide in 1963. Brown is mentioned multiple times in Plath's journals, and the poet sent her more than 20 letters, all of which are currently housed in the Sylvia Plath Collection at Smith. Plath also incorporated Brown into two poems, the first being "The Babysitters" (1961), which recounts a summer both girls worked as nannies in Swampscott, Massachusetts, and the second an unpublished pieced titled "Marcia," in which Plath writes, "she will be always as now: cheeks appleshining translucent from soapandwater scrubbing. she will be always sight of market in the morning: red cheek of beet and radish squashyellow hair and mirrored purpleblack of eggplant eye laced with celerysilver lashes, vegetable and vital."

Signed Letter from Sylvia Plath to her Mother

A <a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/luxury/books-&amp;-manuscripts/book?locale=en&amp;Book%20Type=Signed%2520and%2520Inscribed" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">signed</a> contract for <a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/search?query=sylvia%20plath&amp;tab=objects&amp;sortBy=bsp_dotcom_prod_en" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Plath</a>'s appearance in Seventeen, for her short story "And Summer Will Not Come Again."<ul><li>[New York]:&nbsp;Triangle Publications [Seventeen Magazine],&nbsp;1950.</li><li>Triangle Publications form contract with typed carbon elements printed recto only.</li><li>Signed and dated ("March 17, 1950") by Plath, her mother, and Plath again (as "Witness," using her mother's maiden name).</li></ul> "Future writer... Those rejection slips from Seventeen" — Plath, caption below her high school yearbook photo. Plath had amassed almost fifty rejections from Seventeen before finally garnering this acceptance in March of 1950 for her short story "And Summer Will Not Come Again." Often described as Plath's first professional publication (as this contract notes, she was paid $15), "Summer" details her relationship with a high school boyfriend, John Hodges. Published in August of that year, just before she began her freshman year at Smith, the story would mark the first of eight appearances in the magazine over the next several years. The contract is actually signed twice by Plath, once as herself (noting her age: "17"), and once as "Aurelia R. Schober" (her mother's maiden name) on the "Witness" line — presumably for convenience and expediency. Plath has additionally noted the date ("March 17, 1950"). A rare document marking one of the earliest milestones in the career of one of our most important poets.

Signed Contract for "And Summer Will Not Come Again"

A <a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/luxury/books-&amp;-manuscripts/book?Book%20Type=Signed%2520and%2520Inscribed" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">signed</a> painted portrait of an unidentified young woman by <a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/search?query=sylvia%20plath&amp;tab=objects&amp;sortBy=bsp_dotcom_prod_en" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Sylvia Plath</a>.<ul><li>Sylvia Plath (American, 1932-1963).</li><li>(Wellesley, Mass):&nbsp;n.p,&nbsp;[1948 or 1949].</li><li>Gouache painting on thick paper.</li><li>Signed by Plath on verso: "Sylvia Plath / (Age 16) / 26 Elmwood Rd / Wellesley, Mass."&nbsp;</li><li>With Plath estate seal on both front (lower left corner) and back.&nbsp;</li><li>Housed in a metal frame.</li></ul> An original, bold portrait painted by a 16-year-old Sylvia Plath. Plath made visual art throughout her life in a wide variety of mediums: from collage and oils to watercolor and pastels. Before she settled firmly on poetry in college, she seriously considered majoring in art. This early piece, painted while she was in high school (and, given the inscription on the verso, likely submitted to an art contest or competition), is executed in colorful gouache in a decidedly modern, almost Fauvist style, and features an unnamed young woman resting her chin in her hand. The approach to this piece speaks to her early experimentation with the kind of art that would inspire her writing as an adult. Plath would later write to her mother, "I feel I'm developing a kind of primitive style of my own which I am very fond of" (August 28th, 1956). In 1958, she wrote that her "deepest source of inspiration" was "the art of primitives like Henri Rousseau, Gauguin and Paul Klee and De Chirico [...] Once I start writing, it comes and comes" (quoted in Clark, 518). As this letter suggests, Plath did not merely dabble in art: it was in many ways central to her creative practice. According to Dorothy Moss, curator of the 2017 Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery exhibition of Plath's art, ONE LIFE: SYLVIA PLATH, "I think that once you know that she drew and painted and sketched constantly as a child, and realize that she went to college to major in art, you'll start seeing how vivid her descriptions are, and how beautifully she put visual images into words." That exhibition prominently featured Plath's painting "Triple-Face Portrait" (1950), which shares a decidedly similar sensibility with this piece. A moving and vibrant original work from one of the defining authors of the 20th century, capturing the youthful exuberance she would transform from visual media into the written word

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