|
Our new friend and client Allison was thrilled to discover our coveted Seventeen magazine, from November, 1950, which featured “Ode to a Bitten Plum” written by a young Sylvia Plath. The issue includes a short biographical note about the young author and poet: “She's seventeen and graduated from Wellesley Mass. High School in June and has a full scholarship to Smith College. Last Summer she biked five miles each day to work as a farmhand."
Allison purchased the magazine and shared that she is an avid collector of literary memorabilia. In fact, in 2008, she purchased at auction Plath’s famed pleated, green tartan skirt. A famous photograph of the poet author wearing the kilt while standing outside the Notre Dame Cathedral on a trip to Paris is currently housed in the archive of The Lilly Library in Indiana.
"The skirt represents Plath and her personality in every way - the conflict inside, her inner art monster, cloaked by the most precise, nearly persnickety, clothes," Allison explained. “She wore things that don’t go out of style and selected them with meticulous attention to quality and durability. Plath was miserable, but she created art, and the skirt is a representation of that struggle.”
| 
