Aurelia's Marginal Notes: Some Stats

There are 1,934 pieces of correspondence in the Lilly Library's Sylvia Plath archive. Since posting here in 2013 I have updated in detail the shorthand annotations tally in the Plath mss. II boxes 1-6a in a post made on October 6, 2017: It stands at 159.

Off, Off, Eely Tentacle!

It's interesting to see, in the archives, what Aurelia chose to omit from Letters Home. (What Ted Hughes wanted cut from it is another story.)  Cut from Sylvia's letter of October 2, 1956 is a particularly long list of requests to her mother for material goods and time-consuming favors, one of many such lists omitted. Written from Cambridge, this letter says Ted will be easy to buy Christmas gifts for because he needs everything, and Sylvia plans to

• buy him a briefcase (and Sylvia herself needs one, too; it's the most important piece of writers' luggage) and 
• a bathrobe. Or maybe Aurelia can send the bathrobe? Sylvia asks that it be "warm but not bulky" and specifies the brand name, Viyella. 
• And will Aurelia "please, please" shop for, buy, wrap and send two separate, highly specific wedding gifts to two of Sylvia's American school friends? Sylvia wants to set a precedent so that when she and Ted have their wedding reception in Wellesley, her friends will send gifts. 
• Sylvia adds, "Now, sometime at your convenience, could you send me my two German grammars," and 
• "could we have a few packets, at least three, of corrasable bond" (because that kind of typing paper is hard to find in England). 
• Sylvia finishes the list with "Could you investigate about addresses of children's book publishers--I have no addresses here; you could just look in the bookstores, perhaps. . ."

Aurelia noted in the letter's margins that she could send them her own briefcase; wrote "No" about the bathrobe because Viyella was an English brand; wrote "where?" next to the request for the German grammar books, and sent four packets of corrasable bond. In Gregg shorthand, she penciled the word "omit" twice in the letter's right margin, a word she wrote on dozens of letters while editing Letters Home.

Tart Remarks From 1956

In May 1956, Sylvia's letters to Aurelia were gushing about her wonderful fiance Ted Hughes. Aurelia had never met Ted; she knew only that her daughter had met him three months before and that he was a poet with no job. Aurelia inked some Gregg shorthand notes on the letters, transcribed here for the first time:

On a letter of May 18, 1956, AP wrote: "About settled with Ted! I hope this will work out! Please God."

On a letter of May 26, 1956:  Next to SP's text "[o]ur children will have such fun," AP wrote,  "if they don't starve first."

While Everyone Was Reading The Bell Jar . . .

The Bell Jar was new in the U.S. when I was in high school, and reading about Esther Greenwood's unnamed mother trying to force steno on her daughter, I was delighted and envious that Esther had been allowed to refuse. Little did I know I'd end up transcribing The Bell Jar's author's mother's shorthand.

Here's my high-school transcript. The left side records the office-skills track my own mother determined I would take. The Gregg shorthand courses were 1972-73's STENO 32 and 1973-74's STENO 42, graded B and A respectively.

The courses with "1.00" lasted all year; the .50 courses, one semester.

"Aurelia": What's in a Name?

In the periodic table of elements, "Au" stands for gold. The name "Aurelia" means "golden." It comes from the Latin adjective aureus, from the root word aurum: "gold." That in turn refers to the color yellow, specifically the color of the dawn; thus "Aurora," "goddess of the dawn, [who] renews herself every morning and flies across the sky, announcing the arrival of the sun," is a related name (Wikipedia). Julius Caesar's mother was named Aurelia. All accounts of her say she was respectable.

Aurelia Schober Plath, born in the U.S. in 1906, was the namesake of her own mother, Aurelia Grunwald (later Greenwood) Schober, born in Austria in 1887, when the name's popularity was near peaking in the U.S. according to census records. By 1906 the name was uncommon, ranking #496 in the Social Security Index tally of girls' names. It's trending upward in 2013, although it still isn't among the top 100 baby names.

Variants on the name Aurelia include Aurella, Auriel, and Aurielle.

Plath's volume Ariel (I'm using The Restored Edition here, but it's also true of the other edition) is stuffed with references to gold. Its first line says "Love set you going like a fat gold watch." Next page, "A ring of gold with the sun in it?" Then, "[i]n twenty-five years she'll be silver/ In fifty, gold." "The pure gold baby," "A gold filling," "my gold beaten skin/ Infinitely delicate," "gold-ruddy balls"-- you get it.

And of course if you've read about the poem "Medusa" you know "medusa" (Greek for "guardian or protectress") is a jellyfish grown to the familiar "dangling tentacles" stage, and that "Aurelia" is a genus of jellyfish, the most common kind, seen on the Atlantic beaches near Boston. Both Aurelia Plath and Sylvia knew that. Today we know there is a jellyfish discovered to be immortal.

Aurelia's Journals

I pinpointed a primary and secondary source mentioning Aurelia Plath's journals. In Jacqueline Rose's book The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991), in a chapter called "The Archive," on page 81, Rose writes, "As Aurelia Plath put it in an interview conducted in 1976, she had herself wanted to be a writer but didn't feel she could expose her children to the uncertainty of a writer's life." [Footnote 61].

The footnote said this interview is by Linda Heller, and titled "Aurelia Plath: A Lasting Commitment," received by Smith College, 24 February 1976. It adds, "Aurelia's notes for a talk on 16 March 1976 to the Wellesley College Club were in part based on the journal she kept at that time."

This footnote does not make it clear whether that information appears in the interview, or whether the interview was published ("received" is not "published"), and it isn't clear whether the journal referred to was a 1976 journal or earlier. The notes for the talk are at the Mortimer Library, Smith College.

Reference to a journal is echoed in a book by Luke Ferretter, Sylvia Plath's Fiction (2010), page 12, except in the body of the text, not as a footnote, and specifies the journal is from 1962:

Aurelia kept a journal (calling it a diary); she says so in Letters Home. She quotes her entry of August 3, 1958, on page 348 of the Harper & Row hardback. Her diaries from 1958 and especially 1962 would be an amazing resource; I wonder where they are, and if they are in shorthand, or partly so, and whether that is what keeps them obscure.

Salaries for Stenographers and Sylvia

In 2013, the median annual salary in the U.S. is $45,790; in 2013 a stenographer's median annual salary is $36,325. "Little or no degree of creativity and latitude required," notes the job description. Sylvia Plath knew that, and knew that she and shorthand weren't a good fit.

Lies: There hasn't been "profit" in stenography for 100 years.

Professional stenography began as a largely male occupation; we have Cicero's speeches because his slave invented his own form of shorthand. In the Victorian era, shorthand writers (mostly males, well-paid, using the Pitman system) had clubs and monthly magazines and "translated" classics into shorthand; it was even faddish. Around 1900, stenography began to be derided as women's work. "I'm going to be a stenographer when I get big," assserted eight-year-old Nan Bobbsey, in the first chapter of the first book of The Bobbsey Twins series (1904), proving that by then, stenography was an entirely acceptable occupational goal for middle-class girls. She'd earn about $35 every two weeks. In 1950 legal stenographers in the California Department of Justice--legal stenographers were among the best-paid--earned $2,770 per year or $106.53 every two weeks. In 1974 I was earning $168 every two weeks or $4,368 per year; median household income then was $9,718.

Is that proof enough that stenography was a job and not a career? Stenography and other secretarial skills allowed women the illusion of choice: Office jobs in industries that interested them, although with no chance for advancement, autonomy or even enough of a salary to feed and house them well. In a parallel, the family of a minority male working as a bank security guard could say he had a career "in banking."

Sylvia Plath saw this, and resented and refused it. Aurelia Plath saw the same but urged her to accommodate. Sylvia won this round. In 1957, age 24, Sylvia Plath was offered her first salaried position: a one-year teaching appointment at Smith College, teaching three sections of Freshman English per semester, for $4,200 (Letters Home, 12 March 1957). This kind of pay and status put her far ahead of the "stenos" of the time.

Primary Materials About Aurelia Plath

Seeking primary materials by and about Aurelia Plath, I've learned:

1) Sylvia Plath is said to have burned all her mother's letters to her ("upward of a thousand") in a bonfire in Devon in 1962. Only ten survive in the archives at Lilly Library at Indiana University and at Smith College. One interesting item is a Christmas card Sylvia kept in her purse, given by Ted to Warren and Maggie Plath at the time of Sylvia's funeral in 1963. Bridget Anna Lowe unearthed its story and wrote about it in Plath Profiles 5: Summer 2012.
2) There is no Aurelia Plath archive.
3) The JSTOR database lists no scholarly articles about Aurelia Plath. One unpublished thesis, "The influence of Aurelia Plath on Sylvia Plath: an interpretative biography," was written in 1977.
4) Aurelia kept her own journals, but they are not in any archive.
5) Aurelia's post-1977 letters are at Smith College; the ones actually sent to Ted Hughes are at Emory, although some drafts and carbons are at the Lilly Library.
6) Chief among Aurelia's primary materials is Letters Home, of course, but according to a review of Lessons from the Archive: Sylvia Plath and The Politics of Memory in Feminist Studies (Vol. 31, No. 3, 2005), "the full text of Aurelia Plath's intended introduction has not been published." That is true! Omitted is an anecdote about young Sylvia's sense of humor, and a passage saying the Plath children's questions about sex were always honestly answered and discussed. Lilly Library and Smith hold original and revised Letters Home typescripts.
7) Aurelia was interviewed by journalists and at least two filmmakers. At Washington University I found and copied an interview that was listed but had not been digitized: "Sylvia Plath's Letters Home: Some Reflections by Her Mother," by Robert Robertson in The Listener, Vol. 95, 1976, p. 515. In it Aurelia describes watching Sylvia build a bonfire and burning her second novel and "much else." This contradicts what The Other Ariel (page 57) says: "Aurelia Plath, visiting her daughter from June 21 to August 3, leaves no account of the incident immortalized by the poem ["Burning the Letters"].
8) Aurelia Plath's "Letter in the Actuality of Spring," in Ariel Ascending (1985), edited by Paul Alexander (pp. 214-217) is called an essay, but a footnote explains it's an excerpt from a letter. Alexander provided the title and received Aurelia's permission to print it as an essay.

"Aurelia Plath Had No Self"

From Salon.com, 2000, in an article called "The Real Sylvia Plath," by novelist Kate Moses:

"Aurelia Plath had no self; she lived for and through her children. From Sylvia Plath’s infancy, her primary parent’s selflessness gave Plath no model for a self that could maintain its autonomy or exist beyond meeting other people’s needs. What Plath had instead was one big boundariless, free-floating ego, a self utterly dependent on the inflation by the selfless parent, and all psychic roads, ultimately, led right back to Sylvia. Plath spent her entire adult life trying to trace the ego boundaries for herself that her mother neglected to impose."

Moses is a novelist, not a journalist. The novelist deals in fiction, the journalist in facts. Salon.com, as a journalistic venue, should have asked if Moses could prove her assertions that:

• Aurelia had no self?
• although Aurelia worked part-time from January 1941 to 1942, and full-time from 1942 to 1970, she lived for and through her children?
• she "gave Sylvia no model for a self that could maintain its autonomy or exist beyond meeting other people's needs"? (How can anyone ever know what what Aurelia didn't give?)
• Sylvia "spent her entire adult life trying to trace her ego boundaries"? That's obvious exaggeration. And when, precisely, did Sylvia's adulthood begin?

Aurelia and also Sylvia ('like an empty vessel") are treated in this article and others as if they were fictional characters who can be outfitted with motives and judged without facts. I call this "emo-scholarship." Hugh Kenner, contributor to Modern Critical Views: Sylvia Plath (1989), calls it "parlor psychiatry" (page 68).

The "Manipulatively Controlling Mother"

A respected critic called Aurelia Plath “a manipulatively controlling mother” without stating any facts to back that up. [1] That Sylvia Plath had good reasons to hate her mother is something fans seem to “know” and accept without question. Here are their primary proofs that Sylvia hated her mother: one long, searing journal entry dated 12 December 1958; the assertion that priggish Mrs. Greenwood in the novel The Bell Jar is exactly what Aurelia was like; and the poem “Medusa” (originally titled “Mum”) that portrays Mum as a monster.

It turns out, however, that Sylvia in 1953, after her suicide attempt, spent her first month in the mental hospital telling her psychiatrist she loved her mother, and had to be talked into hating her. This is what the psychiatrist said in papers in a new Sylvia Plath archive opened to the public in January 2020. See what those papers say here.

Almost all of what biographers and critics write about Aurelia Plath is negative, as if facts were few and scanty. They aren't. They have simply been ignored. 

Did you know Aurelia Plath had a first love who kept a diary about their affair? Do you know what courses she taught and where? Do you know where she traveled? Those who know only what Sylvia wrote about Aurelia don't know Aurelia very well.

Please see this short video introducing some facts about Aurelia Plath's life: her college years, her job, how if Aurelia wasn't an easy mother to have, Sylvia was not an easy daughter to have. 

But didn't her mother manipulate her anyway?

We underestimate Sylvia if we think she was easy to manipulate and control!

More on this topic in "How Did Aurelia Plath Manipulate and Control Sylvia Plath?" blog post, 11 July 2023.

[1] David Trinidad, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” Plath Profiles, Vol. 3 (2010) Supplement: Autumn 2010, p. 126.

Aurelia Plath and Shorthand's Evolution

The Gregg Shorthand Manual Simplified, second edition (1955) arrived in the mail today, and will be used to sharpen my shorthand transcription skills before I visit the Sylvia Plath archives at the University of Indiana. Aurelia Plath made shorthand and longhand annotations on her famous daughter’s letters and books. Although Plath scholars are many and avid, no scholar has ever transcribed the shorthand annotations. That is up to me and I accept the challenge.

The version of Gregg shorthand Aurelia learned depends on when she learned it, and that is not yet known. The first Gregg shorthand textbook, a pamphlet titled Light Line Phonography: The Phonetic Handwriting (1888) was published in England by John Robert Gregg in an edition of 500 copies, and in the U.S. in 1898 as a book, Gregg’s Shorthand Manual. Succeeding editions presented refinements—the 1929 edition is the most lauded—but the 1949 edition had a new title: Gregg Shorthand Manual Simplified. “Simplified” emphasized speed and accurate transcription. All earlier versions of Gregg shorthand are called “pre-Simplified.” The 1949 version would have appeared during Aurelia Plath's business-school teaching career, when she was 43.

I was taught from the eighth edition, called the Diamond Jubilee Series (1963-1977), edited to “make shorthand easier to learn.” Even so it wasn’t easy to learn: in high school I studied it for two years.

The Gregg shorthand versions Aurelia learned or taught await discovery. But last autumn in Sylvia’s archives I saw and read Aurelia’s annotations (they are of textbook quality) and think that they will be of interest when transcribed.

What The Bell Jar Says About Shorthand

I am taking an online refresher course in Gregg shorthand to prepare for my week in the Sylvia Plath archive, seeking and transcribing Aurelia Plath's shorthand notations on Sylvia's books and correspondence. I did Lesson 2 today. Gregg shorthand is a unique and graceful written language, with parallels to, and a learning curve similar to, cursive writing. But it'd be hard to convince two generations of Plath scholars that shorthand has any value, because Sylvia, in her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, wrote dismissively about it. Her stand-in character Esther Greenwood, age 19, decides against learning shorthand from her mother, a business-college teacher, during the lowest point of her young life, the summer of 1953.

For the record, The Bell Jar's mentions of shorthand are quoted here. Page numbers correspond to the Bantam paperback edition, published in the U.S. in 1972:

My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us ever since my father died. . . .She was always on to me to learn shorthand after college, so I'd have a practical skill as well as a college degree. [32]


I started adding up all the things I couldn't do.

I began with cooking. . . .

I didn't know shorthand either.

This meant I couldn't get a good job after college. My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand was something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter.

The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters. Besides, those little shorthand symbols in the book my mother showed me seemed just as bad as let t equal time and let s equal the total distance. [61-62]


My mother was teaching shorthand and typing to a lot of city college girls and wouldn't be home till the middle of the afternoon. [94]


By the end of supper my mother had convinced me I should study shorthand in the evenings. Then I would be killing two birds with one stone, writing a novel and learning something practical as well. I would also be saving a whole lot of money.

That same evening, my mother unearthed an old blackboard from the cellar and set it up on the breezeway. Then she stood at the blackboard and scribbled little curlicues in white chalk while I sat in a chair and watched.

At first I felt hopeful.

I thought I might learn shorthand in no time, and when the freckled lady in the Scholarships office asked me why I hadn't worked to earn money in July and August, the way you were supposed to if you were a scholarship girl, I could tell her I had taken a free shorthand course instead, so I could support myself right after college.

The only thing was, when I tried to picture myself in some job, briskly jotting down line after line of shorthand, my mind went blank. There wasn't one job I felt like doing where you used shorthand. And, as I sat there and watched, the white chalk curlicues blurred into senselessness.

I told my mother I had a terrible headache, and went to bed.

An hour later the door inched open, and as she crept into the room I heard the whisper of her clothes as she undressed. She climbed into bed. Then her breathing grew slow and regular.

In the dim light of the streetlamp that filtered through the drawn blinds, I could see the pin curls on her head glittering like a row of little bayonets.

I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it. [99-100].


I thought I'd better go to work for a year and think things over. Maybe I could study the eighteenth century in secret.

But I didn't know shorthand, so what could I do?

I could be a waitress or a typist.

But I couldn't stand the idea of being either one. [103]