Even Wordsworth and Napoleon couldn’t compete with Plathinalia going under the hammer this week – including clothes, a typewriter and her thesaurus
Dickens, Scott, Swift, Wordsworth, Darwin, Adam Smith, even Napoleon; all were just warm-up acts for Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, at the top of the bill in a books and manuscripts auction held at Bonhams in London on Wednesday.
While offerings from the 18th- and 19th-century titans did well to top £5,000 (all figures sans premium) - a feat achieved by a Wordsworth manuscript that went for £11,000, but £1,000 to £2,000 for literary letters, manuscripts and first editions were more typical - the star lots from Plath and Hughes’ estates, put on sale by the poets’ daughter Frieda Hughes, were expected to go for several times that.
Related: Plath's letters probably won't harm Hughes's reputation | Rafia Zakaria
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