In the spring of 1989 a debate was waged in the Guardian over who owns Sylvia Plath's grave. Initially Julia Parnaby and Rachel Wingfield had written a letter to protest that, having travelled to Heptonstall churchyard in Yorkshire so as to visit the grave of the poet, they had found that it was unmarked. They were told the headstone had been removed after repeated vandalization, allegedly by radical feminists objecting to the fact that it commemorates the author as Sylvia Plath Hughes. The absence of this headstone was able to become such an issue of contention, however, because, in addition simply to marking a given burial site, gravestones of celebrities invariably function as a tangible memorial of the deceased for public memory. Marking a grave is meant not only to make sure that the dead poet will not be forgotten but also to designate the manner in which her story is to be remembered. To leave Sylvia Plath's human remains unidentified, claimed Parnaby and Wingfield, could be seen as tantamount to devaluing her work and relegating her to the ranks of the countless culturally productive women who have remained hidden from historical reconstructions of the past. In the course of the following weeks an array of Guardian readers either defended the proposed analogy between marking a poet's grave and marking her place in the tradition of women's literature or critiqued this as an untenable assertion. A. Alvarez, along with seven other renowned authors, called upon Ted Hughes and his family to explain the removal of the headstone, implying that this had been done to discourage people from visiting the grave. Ruth Richardson and A. B. Ewen in turn used the debate over Plath's unmarked grave to make a plea for a public memorial to be set up in honour of this poet (be this in Yorkshire or London). Comparing the erection of a funereal memorial with the posthumous publications of her writings, they suggested that the successful management of the corpus of her work by the inheritors of her estate had been conducted at the expense of the former.