Sylvia Plath in Devon: A Year's Turning by Elizabeth Sigmund and Gail Crowther

A unique insight into the year that Sylvia Plath lived and worked in Devon

• Previously unpublished memories by one of Sylvia Plath’s close friends
• Information from newly discovered letters and documents from the archives offering a unique portrayal of Sylvia Plath during her most productive year
• Previously unpublished photographs
• Offers a fuller and more in depth depiction of Plath during the final year of her life

Sylvia Plath in Devon: A Year’s Turning is part memoir, part biography, focusing on the fifteen months that Sylvia Plath lived on North Tawton, Devon, from September 1961 to December 1962.

This was an extraordinary time for Plath as she finished the proofs on her first novel The Bell Jar, and in the autumn of 1962, produced most of her dazzling Ariel poems. Elizabeth Sigmund recalls the year of her friendship with Plath from their first meeting drinking tea to attending music concerts together.

Gail Crowther considers the impact Plath’s domestic life had on her creative work during this period, drawing for the first time on unpublished letters, documents and previously unseen resources from a wide range of archives in the UK, US and Canada. What emerges is a unique and industrious picture of Plath as she settled into town life, forging new friendships, giving birth to her second child, decorating her new home and producing some of the most memorable and powerful poetry of the twentieth century.

Elizabeth Sigmund is the coordinator of the Organopohosphate Information Network and has been involved with the Working Party on Chemical and Biological Weapons since the mid-1960s. For this work, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Plymouth in 2001. She is the author of Rage against the Dying (Pluto Press). Gail Crowther was awarded her PhD from Lancaster University in 2010 for her thesis The Haunted Reader and Sylvia Plath. She has lectured in Sociology at Lancaster University and Social Science for the Open University. Her current research interests are archival studies, feminist life writing and sociology.

The book is available in paperback priced at £14.99.

ISBN: 978-1-78155-437-1