jonkers rare books
spite of their praise of Ted’s work, “I’ll stick to Yeats and you, thanks”, before signing with a four line autograph postscript, “Take care, eat steak, and I kiss and kiss your mouth and all over in crannies & nooks my dear lovely own teddy - your sylvia”. This letter shows Plath more immersed in Cambridge life, especially thanks to Dorothea Krook (1920-1989) her supervisor and favourite teacher at Cambridge. Krook later recalled Plath as “one of the most deeply, movingly responsive pupils I had ever had. I felt the things I said, we said, her authors said, mattered to her in an intimate way, an - swering to intense personal needs, reaching to depths of her spirit.” (Clark, Red Comet, p.442). In this letter Plath calls her “my one woman friend, here”, in contrast with her peers who are condemned as artificial extroverts or pious, vehement Catholics. She passes on the news that the university magazine Granta will publish her story ‘The Day Mr Prescott Died’, which was based on the death of a close friend’s father in 1954, but the story “seems slight to me now”. She is much more excited about Hughes’s submission of a group of children’s fables, which she is typing up for submission to The Atlantic , although she bridles against the publisher’s stric - tures against depicting gods in the stories. Sylvia was a great champion of Ted’s animal fables, though they would not be published until after her death, when Faber issued them as How The Whale Became (1963). PROVENANCE: Ted Hughes (1930 - 1998); Frieda Hughes (1960-). Price: £35,000
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