Sylvia Plath's Safe Haven: New York City in 1953

Though the format is excruciatingly stylish, we'd recommend attempting to read this story at The Aesthete by Roxane Gay on Sylvia Plath's life in New York, where she worked in the summer of 1953 as a guest editor for Mademoiselle (RIP). Gay looks specifically through the lens of Elizabeth Winder's Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 (Harper 2013). She give us some context:

During that heady month, Plath lived with 19 other young women at The Barbizon Hotel for Women on the corner of Lexington and 63rd. In addition to Plath, famous women like Grace Kelly, Ali MacGraw, Candice Bergen, Joan Crawford and Liza Minelli all spent time at the Barbizon. The building still stands, though it has changed hands several times and is now mostly given over to expensive condominiums. As is the way of New York, the past and present are always overlapping.

Winder chose this focus because, “The stark facts of Sylvia Plath’s suicide have led to decades of reductionist writing about her person and her writing.” Though Pain, Parties, Work does not ignore Plath’s emotional issues, Winder takes a meticulous, ebullient look at Plath’s life through a fairly unique lens—examining Plath’s youthful ambitions, her appreciation for beauty and her impeccable fashion sense. For example, Winder details Plath’s appearance: “At twenty, Sylvia was five feet, nine inches and weighed 137 pounds. She preened and fretted over her height. She resented being sentenced to flats for dances, and would have liked the elegance of a heeled pump. She wore tight preppy vests, crisp tennis whites, wide belts, and lots of silky scarves in heraldic prints.…White halter bikinis in summer, and black cotton sundresses with skinny straps pulled down for tanning.… Dressy black coats with red boots and red gloves, a red leather satchel, red ballerina flats, several red headbands—and endless tubes of wet red lipstick.”

Though the book largely focuses on one month of Plath’s life, it is an engaging read—this portrait of the young woman in the city, the young woman who realized she wanted more for herself. Winder provides ample context on what young womanhood was like in New York during the 1950s and is clearly passionate about the subject. As Winder notes, “New York was just beginning to emerge as a safe haven for women who were more interested in becoming fully formed adults than wives and mothers—a vision of the city that would be crystallized nearly a decade later in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

What remains so fascinating about Sylvia Plath is that we know so much about her life, from how she felt on a given day to what she ate for breakfast on June 1, 1953—“fruit juice, an egg, two pieces of toast, and coffee.” Her unabridged journals offer us unprecedented insight into the woman and Winder draws from those journals liberally, as well as Plath’s correspondence and interviews with several of the women with whom Plath spent that summer in New York, where she was keenly eager to have a true New York experience.

“Sylvia was not in New York to work. The prestige of the award, the professional experience, was little more than a pretext. She was there to live.” Live, Plath did....

All the livin' continues here.