Sylvia Plath & the Rosenstein Papers

Mondays, 2 - 3 p.m. ǀ June 7, 14, 21 and 28 on Zoom

Tuition: $45 for all 4 sessions

Instructor: Emily Van Duyne, assistant professor of Writing and First-Year Studies 

In 1977, Harriet Rosenstein, a young scholar who had done her doctoral dissertation on Sylvia Plath's life and work, seemed to complete a biography of Plath which was under contract at Knopf. Rosenstein had spent the previous eight years gathering materials which included Plath's psychiatric records, autopsy report, and hundreds of hours of interviews with her contemporaries, almost all of whom had cooperated with her extensively, less than a decade after Plath's death. 

For reasons that remain a mystery, Rosenstein never delivered the book. And she sat on all of the materials, fading from the public eye and Plath studies, until, in 2017, she put up the most valuable parts of her archive for sale by an antiquarian bookseller for $875,000. Her archive was made available for study for the first time in 2020. This class will focus on unraveling Rosenstein’s archive and the mystery of her unfinished book on Sylvia Plath.

Presented by the Stockton Institute for Lifelong Learning

Register at stockton.edu/aging