Famous Last Words

Two of Smith’s most iconic alumnae live on in new books.

An allegorical coming-of-age story about a young woman’s fateful train ride, “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom” was written by Sylvia Plath ’55 in the fall of 1952, when she was a junior at Smith. After being rejected by Mademoiselle magazine in 1953, the story went unpublished—until now. Plath collector Judith Lager Raymo ’53 purchased the manuscript at auction in 2016. It was subsequently published in January 2019 by Faber & Faber in the U.K. and by HarperCollins in the U.S. It also appears in the Spring 2019 issue of The Hudson Review (edited by Paula Deitz Morgan ’59) with an illuminating essay by Plath scholar Karen V. Kukil, associate curator of Special Collections at Smith.

Julia Child: The Last Interview and Other Conversations collects six interviews given by “The French Chef,” Julia McWilliams Child ’34, between 1961 and 2004, the year of her death. The book is the latest addition to Melville House’s Last Interview series, with previous installments devoted to the likes of David Bowie, Nora Ephron and James Baldwin. This volume features an introduction by The New Yorker food correspondent Helen Rosner ’04, who writes that Child was—and remains—“a teacher and a voice, a rushing, swooping, whooping, glittering river of words.”

MARY VENTURA AND THE NINTH KINGDOM
By Sylvia Plath ’55
Harper Perennial; January 2019

JULIA CHILD: THE LAST INTERVIEW AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS
Introduction by Helen Rosner ’04
Melville House; March 2019

Part of the Smith Women Create column in the Summer 2019 issue of the Smith Alumnae Quarterly. See also “Three Sheets to the Wind” and “Famous Last Words.”