How Much Money Aurelia Got For Sylvia's Letters

It was such a big event in Aurelia's life I had to pursue the question although told the answer was confidential, none of my business, they didn't know or they wouldn't say.

Aurelia Plath was paid $190,000 for her daughter Sylvia's letters and other items now in the Sylvia Plath mss. at the Lilly Library at Indiana University at Bloomington.

The sale, through a dealer, was completed in March 1977.

$190,000 in 1977 is worth in 2024 either $985,150 or $1,101,400. In either case, a cool million.

Worth it, for Sylvia's letters home, early short stories, diaries, paintings, and memorabilia: more than 3,000 items. Aurelia opened the Lilly collection to the public having decided what the public should see. I think she removed Sylvia's "lost" short stories "The Trouble-Making Mother" and "The Mummy." But let's admire Aurelia's amazing foresight in amassing and preserving for 45 years this dazzling literary trove and making it available. Many a scholar has made money from it.

Aurelia's writings and correspondence never mention meeting an appraiser or dealer, or negotiations over the price and dealer's fee.

Aurelia -- in 1977, age 70 -- for tax reasons divided the $190,000 into 10 annual payments. [1]

I heard more than once that the dealer held back some items and sold them.

Aurelia at a later time donated further Plath materials to the Lilly Library's Sylvia Plath archive.

[1] In 1977 the federal tax rate for a single filer with a taxable income of $19,000 was 34 percent. TaxFoundation.org.

Beth Hinchliffe's Unpublished Sylvia Plath Biography

How differently we would read Sylvia Plath's work and life story had Elizabeth Hinchliffe's Plath biography been completed and published, showing Sylvia and Otto and Aurelia at their weakest and most helpless, portrayals that biographies have tried to avoid.

Part One of The Descent of Ariel, 58 pages, depicts Sylvia, in London in her final winter, as a nuisance who pounded on her downstairs neighbor's door until he opened it and wailed for his help: Would he please crawl over the roof and through a window because she'd locked herself out of her flat? Did he know a plumber? Clearly we're getting the neighbor's view of Sylvia. (In this manuscript he's called "Evans.") Hinchliffe notes that when snowbound, Sylvia had no other adult besides "Evans" to talk with; she didn't yet have a telephone.

Now, I don't believe everything I read unless I can find corroboration and I had to find my own because this manuscript has no footnotes.

Corroboration: Sylvia's anguished letters from fall and winter 1962 and '63, and Dr. Anita Helle, a Plath relative: "Sylvia was almost beside herself with grief and terror in her last months."[1]

In the next chapter Otto Plath's fellow graduate students at Harvard's Bussey Institute describe Otto as a a timid, sniffling outsider who agreed with whatever anyone said and defended himself by quoting other people. A nice guy, someone said, who didn't "carry the guns" to be a scientist. Feared completing his dissertation because then he would have to defend it.

This matches the Otto of the 1918 FBI report: a nervous, morbid man who made no friends, lied that he thought he was a U.S. citizen, and when asked about the war did not say he was a pacifist. 

Otto saved his "Daddy" act for home. His kids learned to shed their real selves at the door and became quiet, well-mannered robot children so he wouldn't yell at them the way he yelled at their mother. They'd assume this outer armor for the rest of their lives.

Aurelia described her own parents as sources of love and laughter -- not as Austrian immigrants who shut out neighbors and tried to re-create Austria in their living room, speaking only German, teaching obedience to authority, to hide one's emotions, work hard, and expect the worst. I'd add that Aurelia's parents were Roman Catholics, a faith centered on sacrifice. They were taught to believe that mother pelicans, when they had to, tore their own flesh to feed the blood to their children. Although pelicans don't really do that. 

Interesting: It was Aurelia's mother who looked for houses and found the one on Elmwood Road. Aurelia was at work, of course. Aurelia's mother had a car and was the household's only driver. So quit saying Aurelia chose the WASPiest house she could find because becoming a WASP was her ambition.

About Aurelia Plath -- plainly the source and link to much of this information -- the unfinished biography says Aurelia wanted her children to have the fun and freedom her own childhood did not. It doesn't mention Aurelia's job or college years, or any of her triumphs; in fact portrays her as friendless. So even a neighbor and professional journalist was another in a long line of biographers who didn't ask Aurelia about herself. 

The text is well-woven, well written and absorbing.

The manuscript, in the Fran McCullough archive at the Hornbake Library at the University of Maryland-College Park, is 123 pages and incomplete. It includes a few photos. It's undated.

[1] A. Helle, "Family Matters," Northwest Review, Vol. 26 No. 2, 1988.