Aurelia Plath and Assia Wevill: Tight Wires Between Them

AI

Reading Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick's books about Assia Wevill, the "other woman" in the Sylvia Plath-Ted Hughes breakup, I noticed that Plath biographers and scholars have treated Assia much as they have treated Sylvia's mother Aurelia. As I read I could even substitute Aurelia's name for Assia's, like so:

 

When one spends time in the archives . . . it becomes increasingly apparent how Assia Aurelia has been elided from the professional and public record in many ways. Her own voice has been silenced: in life, in the archive, and in the public domain. Texts authored by her, specifically her journals and letters, remain unpublished and are difficult to access. Others speak for her and about her, most notably Hughes and Plath, and they tax Assia Aurelia with their own grievances. Part of what I hope to accomplish with this study is the acknowledgement that what we have done to Assia Aurelia in professional scholarship, in texts that circulate on the internet, and in our classrooms is antifeminist and a profound and unkind injury to another woman who deserves better than what she encountered in her life. . . [1]

 

Vastly different women, in the Plath story billeted light-years apart, Aurelia and Assia had in common only that they were females long associated with Ted Hughes. They bonded over that experience. They exchanged letters and met in England in 1967. In 1968 Assia wrote Aurelia that "Ted was brutal to her": "I thought suddenly that that degree of brutality would slowly dement me." [2] Sylvia in her final months wrote her mother that Ted maltreated her and wished her dead. Aurelia photocopied Sylvia's letters and kept them in her bank's safe-deposit box, and preserved Assia's letters in cold storage in the next town over. [3] Aurelia was building a case. For two dead women.

Why have you heard next to none of this? 

It wasn't easy for -- oh, somebody -- to purge from the Plath narrative those most intimately involved and discredit their testimony. Ted ordered both women not to speak of him. When Aurelia and Assia were at last publicly named -- Ted withheld Assia's name for years -- critics and biographers using Sylvia's furious cues called them witches and vampires who ruined Sylvia's life: disposable, talentless minor characters somehow potent enough to be the death of her. Let's demythify: Aurelia and Assia knew too well who was the death of her. [4] 

To Sylvia and Ted, Aurelia Plath and Assia Wevill weren't minor or marginal at all.

Goodspeed-Chadwick points out that scholarship about Assia takes place amid 50 years' worth of smoke and mirrors and the evidence is fragmented, obscure, or forbidden to use. The same with Aurelia. I see now that even feminist writers label the slinky vixen and the schoolmarm prude using identical terms: Desperate. Talentless. Clingy. Wannabes. Schemers. Vacuous. Trivial. Destroyers, devourers. Bad mothers. Sexually suspect. Empty. Unworthy. Monstrous. An essay somewhere says Assia is Medusa . . . Aurelia's and Assia's many faults are so weirdly alike either because they're both Taurus or because our thinking is corrupt. 

Better then not to mention them. Aurelia is such box-office poison, her name such a trigger, that the Plath family materials being processed at Yale get called "Warren Plath's estate." 

Until reading Goodspeed-Chadwick I didn't consider Aurelia's link with Assia. But there was a link. They met. Maybe there's a photo. I want to know more.

[1] Goodspeed-Chadwick, J. Reclaiming Assia Wevill, Louisiana State University Press, 2019, Chapter 1. 

[2] Grogan, K. "Tight Wires," Los Angeles Times Book Review, 16 March 2023. 

[3] Aurelia Plath in longhand annotated Sylvia Plath's letter of 1 January 1961 re "letters in Wellesley safe-deposit box and Assia's in cold storage in Waltham." Plath mss. II, Lilly Library.

[4] Emily Van Duyn's Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation (2024) argues that Ted Hughes abused Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill and undercut their testimonies by obscuring and editing the evidence. I reviewed the book here.

Are You Sylvia's Double? A Quiz

We Plath fans are probably more Sylvia Plath than others are. But really, meme or no meme, how much are you like Sylvia Plath? Do you secretly think you're Silver Plate reincarnated or that she'd accept you as her equal? Or warmly greet you as a kindred spirit? Grant yourself one point for each Yes.

-owner of Sylvia Plath swag or trinkets

-graduated from a "genuinely public" high school

-one parent was an immigrant 

-"One of the most brilliant students"

-"One of the two or three finest instructors" 

-cum laude or better

-published before age 10 

-had a scholarship

-had a fellowship

-picked your nose and stuck its contents beneath a desk    

-big eater

-wrote spitefully in your diary 

-upon seeing a man's genitals became very depressed

-consulted Tarot cards

-had sex with someone because you liked their mind

-somewhere there's a recording of you reading your work

-saw your mother as little as possible

-cottage in the country

-focused

-sexy as all getout 

-sibling with Ph.D.

Scoring: 

19-21  You're Sylvia's double, and that counts for a lot these days.

15-18  Why do you so identify with her?

10-14  Getting there

5-9     Foot's in the door

0-4     You disappoint us 

[See also "Things Aurelia Plath Did Not Say to Sylvia"] 

The Courage of Not Shutting Up

Aurelia Plath with her book Letters Home, getting her say.

Silenced by her son-in-law who held her grandchildren hostage, jeered by critics who judged her daughter's letters false but her daughter's fiction true, Aurelia Plath had things to say and intended to say them without destroying her life and relationships. [1]

Sylvia and Aurelia Plath carved out ways to say what they wished to say. When a circle of hearers was not enough they used the most durable communication tool they had access to: They wrote. If to get messages out they had to be artful, they'd message artfully.

First, Sylvia:

If being heard meant writing and publishing "grisly" and shocking works of art using ethnic slurs and making metaphors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, poems spoken by figures jailed, raped, hunted, suicidal, burnt at the stake, with tongues cut out, Sylvia Plath would be heard. If it cost the good graces of family and mentors, Sylvia wanted her words not only heard but printed and read. Sylvia lived to be read. Readers wanting more would pay to read more. This might have worked to Sylvia's benefit had she and strangers been the only people in the world.

Shutting up became such an occasion that Sylvia wrote a poem about how hard it was: "The Courage of Shutting Up" (first titled "The Courage of Quietness").

Aurelia Plath's diaries, now at the Plath family archive at Yale and I hope not locked away, show Aurelia trained from youth to minimize or hide her life's most consequential facts. Even to herself she could not be so brazen as to say The money's run out. I married a brute. Censure awaited those who complained (let gratitude be your attitude!) or the world could trot out scripture to remind women not to speak.

To communicate artfully and modestly, those taught to measure their words tucked little notes beneath plates, and wrote in margins and in shorthand their families could not read. They spoke sub rosa, used maxims and quotations, euphemisms, greeting cards, formalities. They made suggestions and gave hints. They wrote each other long letters. They sent money. Those able might risk writing a poem or publishing a book. By no means was this the same as shutting up.

[1] "Letters Home can be read like a novel: all this truth, even the frank disclosures are very close to fiction." New York Times Book Review, 14 December 1975. 

N.B.: Plath in 1951 wrote for the Daily Hampshire Gazette an article reporting on a speaker who addressed the qualities of satire: exaggeration, parody, "makes fun of his audience," shock via "obscenities and violence." Reprinted in the Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath, p. 626.

When "Ariel" Was New: Early Critical Essays About Sylvia Plath

I got a hard copy of the earliest compilation of Sylvia Plath criticism, the journal Tri-Quarterly No. 7,  Fall 1966. This "Womanly Issue" devotes 50 pages to essays about Sylvia Plath's Ariel, written by male critics and a poet we can see were good at their jobs. It was generous, bold, even avant-garde for editor Charles Newman to dedicate an issue to female writers, although we can see from the issue's cover that even smart men when they pictured "women" pictured them naked.

Yet they were bowled over and rightly so by Ariel, published in the U.S. that May. Just inside is a full-page ad for Ariel. Would it persuade you to buy a book of poems by a dead female most people had never heard of? Maybe if you subscribed to Tri-Quarterly. Ariel's publishers really must hand it to Robert Lowell -- then a high-profile, public American poet -- for his rousing introduction, from an Ariel review. [1][2][3]

The issue reprints eighteen Sylvia Plath poems, starting with "The Death of Mythmaking" (1959) and "Sow" (1957) and ending with "Daddy," "Lady Lazarus," and "Words." There's also the earliest printing of Ted Hughes's essay "The Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath's Poems." A. Alvarez presented an essay written "partly as a tribute and and partly as an attempt to to show how those last strange poems might be read," and argued that Plath inflicted suffering upon herself -- covering for the fellow male who inflicted most of the suffering, and adding to the essay a sheepish headnote and endnote which is what you have to do when you lie.

Lois Ames and Anne Sexton contributed biographical, not critical, Plath essays. Ames, then Plath's official biographer, quoted from Plath's letters and journals as no one else then was able to, and from some sources I cannot now trace. To round out the "Womanly Issue," poet Richard Howard contributed five separate, warmly worded prose appreciations of the works of Isabella Gardner, Denise Levertov, Carolyn Kizer (a darned good poet; Pulitzer 1985), May Swenson, and Susan Sontag, with full-page photos of their photogenic faces.

Newman collected the Tri-Quarterly essays and more in a book I like, The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium (1970). Appended are a valuable study, by Mary Kinzie, of the earliest U.K. and U.S. Ariel reviews, and facsimile drafts of the poem "Thalidomide." Newman was born and died in St. Louis and from the 1980s was on the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, but between 1988 and his death in 2006 no one there saw hide nor hair of him.

Tri-Quarterly digitized the issue and it may be read here.  

[1] Lowell, Robert, "On Two Poets," New York Review of Books, 12 May 1966.

[2] See different Ariel covers, U.S. and U.K., pictured and parsed in the course blog Technologies of Text, n.d.

[3] Two of the three blurbs appear only in this ad. The one from Robert Penn Warren reads: "A unique book -- it scarcely seems a book at all, rather a keen, cold gust of reality as if somebody had knocked out a window pane on a brilliant night. It is a plangent, painful book, with all the pain translated into beauty, nothing less." Anne Sexton's blurb reads, "I am very moved. These last poems stun me." The third blurb, from The Times Literary Supplement, would become familiar: "One of the most marvelous volumes of poetry published for a very long time."

Sweetly Picking Up Pieces

Here's a note from Sylvia Plath to her mother Aurelia Plath, dated by Aurelia 18 July 1962. Sylvia in this note was telling Aurelia how to feed and care for Frieda and Nick at Court Green, and manage Sylvia's housekeeper Nancy Axworthy while Sylvia was away on business.

Sylvia's note is "real nice" considering she'd banished houseguest Aurelia during the week of July 9, telling her to find a hotel. Not finding a room, Aurelia had by July 14 moved in with Sylvia's midwife Winifred Davies. Yet Aurelia was asked to visit daily to serve Sylvia as a free babysitter and cook. As much as Sylvia hated hosting her mother, Aurelia hated to babysit Sylvia, who reacting to her husband's cheating howled with grief and drove her car off the road, was so shattered and out-of-control that the local doctor sedated her. [1] In turn, Winifred Davies gave Aurelia a sleep aid. 

The above note was tucked into Aurelia's 1962 diary at the appropriate page and photographed in situ. It is part of Aurelia Plath's literary estate, which along with Warren Plath's literary estate was donated by the Plath family in February 2025 to Yale University's Beinecke Library. Its archivists are currently processing the donated materials. The note ends, "Love, Sivvy."

[1] Sylvia to Ruth Beuscher, 20 July 1962: "got the doctor to knock me out for 8 hours after a week of no eating or sleeping" 

Cultural Debris in Aurelia Plath's Archives

Meet Aurelia Plath's Joys of Jell-O cookbook (1962). Among her last effects and sharing a packing box with Great Short Stories of the World, this volume testifies to how, with one-quarter of a stomach, Aurelia lived days, weeks, and months on fruit-flavored gelatin mixed with whatever she could tolerate. Featured recipes include "Ring-Around-the-Tuna Salad" and the timeless "Broken Glass" dessert.

What's cultural debris? The leavings and tag ends of fads and fashions inconsistent with the level of discourse. Aurelia Plath's papers have few such items. She never mentions pop music or coffee brands or her era's entertainers. Only one fad really swept her away:

To Linda Wagner-Martin, 9 December 1985

 

 

In Aurelia's copy of "Bumblebees and Their Ways"

Aurelia Plath to Mary Ann Montgomery, 1980

Aurelia started in the 1970s drawing "smiley faces" next to written or printed remarks, a pox-like American habit now faded but not extinct. The sun-colored "smiley" symbol that in the '70s defaced every manner of consumer item lived on to sire the whole emoji tribe. On a Christmas 1965 letter from Ted Hughes, Aurelia drew a "sad face" because Ted had canceled her upcoming annual visit with her grandchildren. (He wasn't ready to explain Assia Wevill's baby.) Aurelia drew that teary "sad face" on Ted's letter well after first reading it, because she used a type of marker not available in 1965.

Aurelia to Mary Ann Montgomery, 1980

Aurelia had to explain "Paper from granddaughters" because the image was so uncomfortably inconsistent with who she was. Artist Bernard Kliban (1935-1990) drew tabby-cat cartoons printed by the millions on stationery, greeting cards, and tee-shirts ("Love to eat them mousies. . .") and the Kliban Cat still has fans. Of the examples of cultural debris in Aurelia's papers, the popularity of this nameless solitary cat (never a comic strip character, never animated) most defies political analysis. 

What else? Aurelia tried to quote in Letters Home Khalil Gibran's famous prose poem, "On Children" ("Your children are not your children"), made mawkish by overuse. Her editor stopped her. Online you will find a quotation from the popular prose poem Desiderata("You are a child of the universe") credited to either Sylvia or to Aurelia. Aurelia had quoted the poem in a letter to Sylvia, who liked it enough to quote it in her journal. [1]

Sylvia Plath on the other hand practically drowned in cultural debris, reading formulaic stories in women's magazines, in New York City vomiting beautifully sculpted food, and while wearing queerly-cut dresses watched food stylists using toothpicks to prop up melting scoops of ice cream.

[1] Journals, 27 February 1956. "Desiderata" (1927), an inspirational work by Max Ehrmann, was ever more widely quoted and reprinted in the 1960s and 1970s as a sort of creed for the counterculture.

How the "Letters Home" Playwright Changed the World

Montage from The Burning Bed, starring Farrah Fawcett, 1984

Imagine living in a time and place when it was legal and even good to beat your wife.

Sylvia and Aurelia Plath lived in that patriarchs' paradise, and their husbands abused them. We find this horrifying. But domestic abuse was common, and a victim's speaking out was called "He said she said" and was therefore nothing. Until.

Playwright and screenwriter Rose Leiman Goldemberg wrote the TV movie The Burning Bed (1984). It was the first really raw and bloody TV portrayal of a battered wife tried for murdering her husband. More than 50 million people watched its premiere. [1] The result: criminalization, in the U.S., of domestic violence and marital rape. The latter, considered a separate issue, became illegal in all 50 states in 1993. The federal Violence Against Women Act, passed in 1994, has since updated its language and scope.

Before The Burning Bed, if police saw no violence they didn't make arrests. Clergy counseled married women despite broken jaws and shiners to remember their vow to honor their men. Shelters for women and children were few. There were some domestic-violence phone helplines. A 1-800 number appeared at the movie's end. Tens of thousands phoned that evening.

Rose Leiman Goldemberg

Goldemberg died July 21 at age 97. Her link with Sylvia Plath is her adaptation of Letters Home, a selection from Sylvia's letters edited by her mother Aurelia Plath. The two-character play debuted in New York in 1979, went to London and Paris and onward, and there is a very good closed-captioned French-language film of it (1986). Goldemberg earned Aurelia Plath's trust with a staged reading in Warren Plath's living room. Aurelia received 50 percent of each production's profits and letters document the women's friendship. But Goldemberg had to move on to her next book, play, or movie. She wrote a lot of each. [2]

As with The Burning Bed, Goldemberg often dramatized biographies and hustled to sell her scripts and see them produced. In the 1980s all three commercial television networks aired prime-time made-for-TV movies. All rejected the Burning Bed. They said no big female star wanted to appear disheveled and bruised to play a battered wife and mother. Except Farrah Fawcett. Fetishized for her pin-up photo and iconic hairdo, Fawcett had left what was called "jiggle TV" for gritty roles in off-Broadway plays such as Extremities. She gave a performance so memorable people still watch it.

Hollywood actors then asked Goldemberg to write them similar star vehicles with serious themes. She wrote Stone Pillow (1985), about a homeless woman, for Lucille Ball. All three networks then exploded with TV movies exposing the harm done by incest, stalking, parental kidnapping, and psychiatric treatment, which Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar had made a women's issue. These TV movies are now on YouTube and exist because women writers had and used their nerve.

Success felt strange. In a note to herself written two weeks before Letters Home premiered, Goldemberg, temporarily away from home, 1) longed to talk with Aurelia but didn't want to burden her and 2) felt insecure, yet exhilarated. "I am fifty, and old enough to know something," she mused. "Do we keep discovering?" [3]

Some of Goldemberg's earlier plays now seem dated. The Plath play was her only international hit. She wrote novels and screenplays few people ever heard of. It is easy for writers to think that a life spent writing what they were moved to write was mostly wasted.

Note to self: It never is. 

[1] "Francine Hughes Wilson," New York Times obituary 31 March 2017, says 75 million.

[21 See roseleimangoldemberg.com, her New York Times obituary (30 July 2025), and a full-length interview with Goldemberg (2011) opening with a discussion of The Burning Bed, on YouTube.com.

[3] "Thoughts at Barbara's typewriter," 12 September 1979, Rose Leiman Goldemberg Papers, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library.

 Actor Doris Belack, Letters Home's original "Aurelia," and Aurelia Plath at the American Place Theater, New York, September 1979. (That's not Sylvia's necklace.) 

A Hun Named Attila

Attila Kassay, M.B.A. Harvard, 1957.

Sylvia Plath was a schoolgirl when the Cold War started in 1946. She saw communist Russia pulp Eastern Europe into a featureless "bloc" and rule it with no end in sight. The next generation thought Russians invented communism because no one told us otherwise. In school we saw no educational films about "communist countries" and heard not a peep about their histories or cultures, with one exception: Hungary.

Schools allowed us Hungary in small doses: a folk tale, or "Hungarian dances" as a piano-lesson staple. Americans even tolerated Hungarian TV stars who made fun of themselves: Ernie Kovacs, Zsa Zsa Gabor. Hungary was special. It got a pass. My heritage Eastern European to the core, I sensed this but I had not the tools of reason, and the forces ruling us did not intend to equip us.

But they didn't stop middle-schoolers from ordering selected paperbacks for fifteen cents or a quarter through a service called Junior Scholastic. I bought and read to tatters I Am Fifteen and I Don't Want to Die (1966) a Hungarian girl's World War II survival story, and James Michener's The Bridge at Andau (1957), about the failed 1956 revolution. Hungarians, I learned, were anti-communist homeland patriots. That they were not Slavs but Magyars was in their favor. Russia was Slavic, tainting all other Slavs. We were taught nothing about them except they brainwashed kids to be godless communists. This was our parents' worst nightmare. [1] In Cold War politics the enemy could be anywhere--on your block, in Cuba, in protest songs, in outer space. Only a radical might translate Polish poetry and pester us to read it.

Plath's pre-Cold War juvenile diaries show her teachers promoting cultural exchange, which Plath adopted as one of her values. May through July 1945 Plath read three Hungary-themed children's books by author-illustrator Kate Seredy, who wrote The White Stag (1938), a folk tale impressively illustrated with great historical tableaux and the noble deeds and steeds of tribal Huns and Magyars. [2] This cultural exposure, however mild, prepared Sylvia to care or feign care about later events in Hungary. [3]

Westerners thought warmly of Hungary even before the Iron Curtain. Several thousand Hungarian elites after their 1848 war on Austria moved to the United States. Nicknamed "Forty-niners," their refinement made a favorable impression. Another wave post-World War I brought artist Kate Seredy. Hungarian intellectuals in the 1930s fled the Nazis rather than join them. It's a nation's intellectuals and artists who write and sing their history, so we heard about Hungarian exiles' and immigrants' world-class contributions to filmmaking and design, and winning every category of Nobel Prize except for Peace. Communists after World War II seized control of Hungary's universities, purging them of Jews and bourgeoisie. Student Attila Kassay (b. 1928), University of Budapest, was one of them. [4]

A federal student-exchange program in 1949 brokered for Kassay a $425 scholarship to Boston's Northeastern University. It covered a year's tuition. [5] Kassay arrived in April 1950. Through his U.S. senator, Kassay in 1953 was able to apply for permanent residence. [6] He met and dated Sylvia Plath, who got swoony over Continentals with exotic names. [7] He joked that he was King of the Huns and this amused her. She loaned him ten cents so he could buy a comb. (Was he broke?)  Four years older than Sylvia, he was worldly, suave, and ready for the long term, but Sylvia was not, wanting mostly "to conquer the cosmopolitan alien before I return to the rustic boy-next-door. Feminine vanity?" (Journals, 145). An Anglophile at heart, she later married Ted Hughes.

Kassay finished his Business Administration degree with honors and in 1957 his Harvard MBA. [8] In 1959 he married Sylvia Coutts. They settled in Worcester, Massachusetts and had four children. Known professionally as corporate vice-president Allan Kassay, he died in 1973, only 45 years old, but his Plath contact has made him as immortal as his name.

[1] They had their reasons. Unlike us they'd witnessed or heard firsthand how communism in practice got people killed.

[2] That fifth-century Huns and ninth-century Magyars together founded Hungary is a medieval legend, popular but false. Huns and Hungary are not related.

[3] Genealogical research shows Plath had Hungarian ancestry through her great-grandmother Barbara Greenwood. In her poem "Daddy," Plath styled Barbara as a "gypsy ancestress," in line with the stereotype of Hungarians as gypsies.

[4] Northeastern's yearbook "The Cauldron," 1955, says Kassay attended too the University of Innsbruck. 

[5] Background from Medalis, Christopher N., "American Cultural Diplomacy: The Fulbright Programs in U.S.-Hungarian Higher Education," diss. Columbia University, 2009. $425 in 1950 funded one year of full-time tuition at Northeastern. Kassay did hold student co-op jobs.

[6] The Refugee Relief Act of 1953 was specifically for refugees from communist countries. Kassay's request is in the Congressional Record, U.S. Senate 13 April 1953, page 2964, "Bills Introduced by Mr. Saltonstall."

[7] Plath also had fantasies about Polish males, embarrassing even to read.

[8] Boston Globe, 13 June 1957, p. 16. 

Only Perfection Will Do

For Aurelia Plath only perfection would do -- her ideas of perfection. Which were others' ideas of perfection. These overwhelmed her. Where Aurelia had control, she fixed matters, wary of what other people might think and say. She took criticism very personally, dreading it, warding it off. Sylvia when criticized got furious. No one would so fear criticism unless there were real and painful penalties for falling short of expectations. 

Was Aurelia a born conformist? No. She had pranced around onstage in men's clothes. She had a premarital sexual affair with a man her father's age. She dated a married man and in sinful Nevada lied that she lived there, and after his instant divorce instantly married him. Wife of a Jekyll-and-Hyde, Aurelia became hypervigilant and learned subterfuge and shutting up. And the longer Aurelia lived the more chance of criticism, because standards for womanhood and motherhood rose so eye-wateringly high, and kept rising, that criticism tipped over into judgement.

Judgement: deciding who a person is, based on one trait or incident. Such as a hairdo.

The above portrait of Sylvia is her lovely college graduation photo, signed by photographer Eric Stahlberg, taken in Northampton, 1955. He retouched the photo's glass negative, covering Sylvia's facial scar and the bobby pin that anchored her wave. Not so you'd notice.

It wasn't perfect enough. I have it on good authority, plus photos, that like many (most?) midcentury women, Aurelia was very conscious of the look of her hair. Everybody knew that hair is a woman's crowning glory -- Plath's portrait is all about her hair -- and if it's neat and tamed so is the woman, and if it's been coifed, she's a somebody. And ideally women had curls or at least a wave. And were blond. That was a lot to ask, but for this milestone photo, Sylvia or Aurelia or both cared enough to want it all.

Aurelia reproduced her personal print of the photo in Letters Home; It is a different photo: The chin is less lifted and the face very slightly turned so the right eyelash is absent. I took a photo of it good enough (above) to show that the split ends at the back of Sylvia's head had been painted out. Enlargement showed beneath the bobby pin words in cursive, hard to read, drawn on this particular negative.

When lightened and greatly enlarged (and the image flipped vertically, not shown) I saw on this second, retouched version, between the set of short lines pointing upward and downward, the words "Retouch marcel."

Close-up at Sylvia's temple: Can you see the writing?

It isn't clear whether Aurelia or Sylvia ordered this done. Both were perfectionists, and I can't tell you how much women of the time -- and later -- aspired to perfect immunity from criticism by those they knew, and feared judgement by those they didn't; judgement so severe it could not bear a visible bobby pin. Meanwhile mother and daughter spoke snidely of others and were super-critical of themselves. 

Sure, retouch the flyaway strands. Yet the request was to widen and deepen the wave or "marcel" in Sylvia's hair, so brightly studio-lit one can't tell if she was blond  or brunet. I always thought -- maybe you did too -- this photo showed her blond. But then why darken the bottom of the hairdo, thickly repainting it a cloudy black, obscuring individual strands? Compared to Stahlberg's print, the book version's higher contrast and taming create almost a zebra effect.

This must have satisfied, or Aurelia wouldn't have reprinted the photo.

"Sylvia Died Yesterday"

"Sylvia died yesterday," said the cablegram from Ted Hughes to Sylvia Plath's aunt Dorothy on 12 February 1963. Dorothy called Sylvia's brother Warren. The pink page above is Aurelia Plath's carbon copy of "Last Commentary," written in 1974, describing how she learned about Sylvia's death. Aurelia wanted this published in Letters Home. Her editor reduced it to its first sentence.

Aurelia's is the only report of this event. It's in the Sylvia Plath archive at Smith College. The complete page, with its handwritten annotations, says:

(Last Commentary)

[[in black ink]] -- as it really was 

[[in pencil, upper right corner]] from Final Account Folder 6/7/74 

On February 12, 1963, my sister received a cablegram from Ted, stating, "Sylvia died yesterday," and giving time and place of funeral. No mention of the cause of death or of the whereabouts and condition of the children!

When I came home, later than usual, for I had stopped to have a hair shampoo and set after I had left Boston University, I saw Warren's car parked outside of my house. Thinking they had come for a surprise visit, I dashed joyously into the house, greeting both Warren and Margaret happily. They were very quiet, I noticed. We sat down in the living room and exchanged a few inconsequential remarks. Then I became aware of the tense atmosphere, the constraint evident in each of them. "You've come to break bad news to me," I then said, giving them the opening they were seeking. They told me of the cablegram Dorothy had received that morning. "The children," was my first cry. "What of the children!"

"Margaret called the British Consul in Boston, and we have learned they are alive and being cared for," Warren assured me. Then he told me he and Margaret were planning to go to England immediately. I wanted the children to be in our joint care. They promised they would do all they could to achieve this arrangement, urging me not to join them, persuading me that my presence might make such arrangements more difficult. My minister, the late Reverend William Brooks Rice, agreed with Warren and Margaret. [[added in blue ink]] so did my physician, Dr. Robert Brownlee. 

That's Aurelia's story. [1] In real life she was probably stunned and sickened to hear that her daughter was dead and guessed at once that it was suicide. Aurelia likely raved about Ted's cowardice in routing the shocking news through Dorothy and not naming any cause. I bet she argued long with Warren before conceding that she should not go to England. Others were told Aurelia was too sick to go.

Like all of Aurelia's elaborations this account is defensive. She wanted readers to know that titled authorities approved of her skipping the funeral, lest readers think she didn't go because she didn't care. The shampoo-and-set excuse backs Aurelia's claim that she was habitually home from work by 3 p.m. to greet Sylvia and Warren after school, not an "absent parent." Had the "bring the children to America" plan come through, instead of seizing and smothering the kids Aurelia would have nicely co-parented with Warren and Margaret.

The text seems to suggest that concern for her grandkids eclipsed her concern for her daughter, but by 1974 Aurelia knew better than to write about Sylvia's death: Ted would edit it out. Aurelia, who knew every dirty detail, had to keep silent or he'd deny her visits with the kids. And Ted sure didn't want us to know he'd burdened Dorothy and Warren with breaking the news. Aurelia wanted that on record, and to show that she valued her grandchildren's welfare above all.

Most of Aurelia's 1960s journals, or those that survive, convey much the same, recording only her annual visits with Frieda and Nick. She once called the children "pieces of Sylvia." That sounds awful, but for Aurelia the children were more than that. They were vessels for Aurelia's love, which Aurelia expected to be returned. It wasn't. She believed, or pretended to believe, in her century's campaign to persuade women that families were bound by love and members ought to love each other: the spiritual equivalent of painting little red hearts on everything. 

[1] AureliaPlath.info followers already know how to read Aurelia's anecdotes. If you don't, please see "It's Aurelia's Story and She's Sticking To It," Aureliaplath.info, 11 February 2025.

Sylvia Plath's Academic Stress

Eighteen-year-old Sylvia Plath had written her mother Aurelia about exhaustion, sleeplessness and thoughts of suicide during her first semester at Smith College. On Sunday 10 December 1950 she wrote her mother about a fellow freshman who was suicidal over the college's academic demands. Reading between the lines, Aurelia wrote, in Gregg shorthand, on that letter's envelope:

Go to Dr. Booth Sylvia should go with her. If she wants they can should see Dr. Booth Tuesday. Girl will then be brought analyzed in one another presence. 

Aurelia, clearly rattled, seemed to misunderstand psychiatric treatment, yet wasn't ignorant or cold regarding Sylvia's depressions and was sharply aware that Sylvia needed something like analysis. Sylvia's previous letter (7 December 1950) had signaled Aurelia with triggering words:

. . . hoping that I can make it to Xmas vacation without going completely insane -- you know that sort of morbid depression I sink into. . . 

Not 24 hours after writing the December 10 letter Sylvia wrote Aurelia that her friend seemed much better.

Getting all "A" grades was a distinction Sylvia wanted whatever its price. As a scholarship student, she only worked harder. Aurelia later told psychiatrists and journalists that overwork -- and not sexual matters -- had driven Sylvia to a breakdown. Academics were a double-digit percentage of Sylvia's trouble in summer 1953. In Sylvia's journal, October 1951, her sophomore year, Sylvia had written:

But worst of all I have this terrible responsibility of being an A-student. . . and I don't see how I can keep up my front. [1]

The tripwire for Sylvia's suicide attempt was academic: being denied admission to Frank O'Connor's writing course at Harvard. Sylvia tried killing herself in late August, the timing suggesting she dreaded returning to Smith for an extra-demanding senior year requiring an honors thesis about a novel, Ulysses, she hadn't yet read, and comprehensive English-lit exams she wasn't prepared for. [2] Which was her own fault. Esther Greenwood says:

I'd skipped [a course in eighteenth-century literature]. . . . They let you do that in honors, you were much freer. I'd been so free I'd spent most of my time on Dylan Thomas.  (TBJ, 139) 

She might even fail those exams. Or score less than brilliantly and not get a summa cum laude to go with her Phi Beta Kappa and college writing prizes, and so on.

Sylvia spent the fall '53 semester in mental hospitals and had electroshock treatments until in December she suddenly felt much better. In 1959 she pondered:

Why, after the 'amazingly short' three or so shock treatments did I rocket uphill? [3]

Sylvia wrote that the few treatments felt like sufficient "punishment." She doesn't say that if she claimed to be healed she could return to college for a gently scheduled extra semester to correct her path toward a triumphant senior year.

[1] Journal Fragment 17-19 October 1951, Journals.

[2] In the 1950s through the '60s, James Joyce was every English department's darling. Joyce scholars were the giants of the discipline (and acted the part). Sylvia wanted to be counted among them. Realizing she might not succeed, she chose another topic.

[3] "Therapy Notes," 3 January 1959, Journals. 

Otto Plath in the News

I'd thought a Nevada divorce was your own business and no one else's, so was surprised to read about Otto's in the old Boston American, January 5, 1932.

According to "dispatches"? From whom and where it didn't say. Otto Plath had divorced the day before, January 4. That news arrived in Boston overnight? Did Otto phone the Boston papers to tell them? Did Aurelia's mother phone in to get ahead of any gossip? Was Otto so well known? The fancy biology professor divorced in Sin City, U.S.A. some Lydia gal. Who knew?

The tattlers were Reno's squad of part-time newspaper "stringers." These freelance reporters wrote up and telegraphed to papers news too minor for full-time journalists. Stringers in Reno got the list of the day's divorces -- public information. They chose and distilled them, then wired them overnight to the parties' hometowns(!). A published dispatch paid the stringer $2, or $5. For a celebrity's divorce, maybe $10.

The Plath divorce notice again appeared January 8 in The Boston Post, specifying Carson City, Nevada. Not a peep about Otto and Aurelia marrying there.

Otto Plath wasn't in the newspapers much. He spoke to a beekeepers' society in 1923, gave a few other public talks. Aurelia took little Sylvia to hear Otto speak at Boston University, I think on February 23, 1935. The Boston Transcript said his topic was "Nature Study." Maybe it's that memory Sylvia wrote about in her short story "Among the Bumblebees":

Alice had thought, then, of the great hall at college where her father stood, high upon a platform. She had been there once with Mother, and there had been hundreds of people who came to listen to her father talk and tell them wonderful strange things about how the world was made.

Plath Ancestry, Solved

Plath ancestors. Sylvia's complete family tree is at FamilySearch.org.

Used to be that the Plath family tree went back only to 1826, the birth year of Sylvia's great-grandfather Johann, the man who disowned his grandson Otto. That's 200 years. It wasn't enough.

I recently added two confirmed generations to Plath ancestry, back to the 1700s.

Johann Plath and wife Caroline came to the U.S. from Prussia in 1885, bringing two young-adult children, Emil and Marie. According to locals, the Plaths arrived in Wisconsin "very poor people." I figured they had fled German/Prussian persecution. In fact Johann's brother had died in 1884 and Johann intended to run his brother's farm. When Johann retired he rented a house. By 1899 he was able to pay Otto's passage to America and for the boy's tuition. The string attached was that Otto had to become a Lutheran minister. When Otto, college graduate, told Johann he'd rather be a teacher, Johann crossed Otto's name out of the family Bible and cut him loose.

Otto might not be the only offspring Johann disowned. Either he or Caroline told the 1910 federal census-taker that they had eight children, five still living. [1] Documentation shows only two of the eight were dead: a son who died in childhood and Marie, dead in 1895. Johann, maybe along with his wife, considered one of his six surviving children dead to him.

Which child? Don't know. But if this wasn't a miscalculation it offered more of a sense of how Johann's love and money were contingent on obedience, even from a grandson who in 1910 was 25.

They said out of their eight kids only five were living.

Of old Johann's father, U.S. records said only that his name was Julius, and there the Plath family trail went cold. There were many ethnic-German "Julius Plaths" all over Prussia, and none a match.

A Plath descendant had met with this same genealogical "roadblock," and last year I promised I would scour German/Prussian records to find our man. Three weeks ago I found Julius and a bonus -- his parents' names and their wedding date.

Born in Luebbersdorf in northern Prussia, Julius Plath (1791-1847) was baptized Andreas Julius Plath, after his two baptismal sponsors. Other local records call him "Andreas Julius" and "Julius Andreas," but he went by "Julius" and his own kids didn't know otherwise.

Julius was copying his own father, Johann Heinrich Plath (born 1766) who amid the tons of other "Johanns" in the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin chose to be called "Heinrich." Below is Julius's 1791 baptismal record. Heinrich's name starts beneath the inkblot, and the entry ends with his wife's name, Regina Maria Schroeder (b. 1763) whom Heinrich married in 1785. [2]

The name "Heinrich Plath" starts on the line below the ink blot.

Google Lens solemnly told me it couldn't read the above. So I applied my experience, and bingo.

The land that in Otto's time became the Polish Corridor has twelve (yes, a dozen) towns and villages named "Grabow." Via the Julius inquiry I was finally persuaded that Otto Plath's birthplace was the "Grabow" specifically in district Mecklenburg, Otto's now well-documented North German ancestral home. Then I tried finding a record of Otto's birth. The books covering his birth year, 1885, and a few adjacent years are missing.

[1]  United States, Census, 1910," FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MPVY-J66 : Thu Mar 07 18:28:20 UTC 2024), Entry for John Plath and Caroline Plath, 1910.

[2] I replaced the umlauts in the text with the "ue" and "oe" just for now.

Sylvia Plath family tree at FamilySearch.org. 

Pleased With Everything: Plath Family Papers at Yale

The Plath family has gifted Aurelia and Warren Plath's literary estates to Yale University's Beinecke Library. This donation ended my seven years of being bound by a non-disclosure agreement. 

I saw and photographed Aurelia Plath's estate materials, then privately owned, back in 2018, and despite temptation have kept quiet all this time, praying that the letters, postcards, photo albums, artwork, realia, and Aurelia's journals -- ranged across 22 different notebooks, entries dated 1924 to 1990 -- might not rot in boxes or be auctioned off piece by piece, that the archive would stay whole, a gift to all Plath scholars. I am grateful.

Aurelia's journals for 1963, photographed in 2018. I used the ruler for scale in case these notebooks were never seen again.

In 2018 I spent only two days with the 20-plus boxes of Aurelia's estate so couldn't see every bit, but it included treasures I hope haven't been sold or withheld. We will at last see what Aurelia did not sell to Indiana University or donate to Smith but kept until she died. Yale's archivists are currently processing the materials and told me they expect to finish in autumn. I plan to be there and report to you. I don't expect a mob. This is the stuff Aurelia valued and you know how she has been valued. My impression was that Aurelia was a very critical and love-hungry adult (so was Sylvia) and she could keep a secret.

Remember this is once again Aurelia-curated material. It might or might not alter the narratives we are used to.

Such a thrill, of the sort researchers get! And what a relief. For two days after I learned about this gift to Yale I quivered all over and couldn't sleep or eat. Call me a geek, but I'm a happy one.

The "Very Pretty" Mrs. Plath Who Was Not Aurelia

Otto Plath's first wife Lydia Bartz, as she looked when they met.

Here's a new-found photo of Otto Plath's first wife, Lydia Bartz, in 1910 a clerk at the Fall Creek, Wisconsin, general store her father founded. She married Otto in Spokane, Washington, in 1912. The couple then moved to Berkeley, California, where in 1915 Otto split for New York without her, complaining that she was "not educated" and sexually cold.

Not only was Lydia Bartz "very pretty," as the town clerk told Harriet Rosenstein she was: Lydia was diligent. [1] When Otto abandoned her, owing her prosperous family a crippling amount of money, Lydia with Otto's sister Frieda enrolled in a Chicago nursing school, graduated in 1918, went to Ohio for post-graduate studies, moved back home, and soon supervised the surgical unit of Luther Hospital in Eau Claire, the city nearest Fall Creek. Below, in 1953, Lydia is honored by her college's alumnae for her years of service and for teaching "more than 500 nurses," but her service wasn't over; she passed her final annual nursing-license exam in 1960, age 71.

April, 1953

Yet Lydia's life wasn't anywhere near finished; she lived until 1988, dying at age 99. She was the only one of five Bartz sisters to marry, and even after a 15-year separation from Otto and no children she refused to divorce him, making his life difficult. Otto -- immortalized by his daughter Sylvia Plath as "Daddy" the fascist and "brutal male," doubtless deserved it, because Lydia, and Otto's second wife Aurelia Schober, learned to hate him, and Sylvia as a child "many times wished that he were dead." [3]

1. "very pretty": Fall Creek town clerk Marjorie Shong to Harriet Rosenstein, 22 February 1977, Emory.

2.  Luther is now a Mayo Clinic satellite campus.

3. Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 293. 

Photo credits: 1910 photo from Henke, Patricia: Sights and Sounds of the Valley: A History of Fall Creek (1978); Eau Claire (WI) Leader-Telegram, 16 April 1953. 

Sylvia Von Platho

Baroness Charlotte Sophie von Platen und Hallermund (1669-1725)

Plath family lore says Sylvia Plath's paternal great-grandfather Johann, when he came from Prussia to America, gave his name as Johann von Plath, the "von" indicating descent from a line of nobles, specifically barons, who for 900 years had lived on land grants from Prussian rulers. An American official scolded Johann, "We do not allow titles in America."

Not contented to live the rest of his life as a common Wisconsin farmer, ten years later for his daughter Mary's death certificate Johann Plath gave his surname as "von Platho." His father and brother and his children and grandchildren were all from birth surnamed "Plath," none of them "von Plath," or "von Platho," which sounds like a made-up name anyway. But it's a real name.

Sylvia Plath's paternal line shared its home territory with generations of nobles surnamed von Platho, von Platen, von Plotho, von Plato (many scholars have that name), von Plathe -- all from the German root "plat," meaning "flat." The "plat"-rooted names were geographical, "von" meaning "from." So all those names, which in German sound much alike, mean "from the lowlands of northern Germany." That area's also called Pomerania, which is Polish and means "on the sea."

While everyone wishes to have noble or royal ancestry, and Johann Plath, Otto Plath's illiterate grandfather, was a status seeker, no evidence links Sylvia Plath with Prussian or German gentry. German chancellor Otto von Bismarck in the 1870s and 1880s liked handing out the "von" title to flatter and keep the loyalty of wealthy industrialists and parvenus, but Sylvia's family of farmers and small-town blacksmiths was unlikely to receive even that lowest of noble titles. [1] The surname "Plath," with no "von," is very very common.

[1] Spring, David, ed. European Landed Elites in the Nineteenth Century. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. 

Sylvia Plath's Hair Ribbons and Headbands

Sylvia Plath, 1937.

The cut-out photo below is from Aurelia Schober's college yearbook 1928, and I wonder if it's really her; as that yearbook's editor-in-chief, Aurelia surely pasted her own photo, unlabeled, into a yearbook page titled "When We Were Very Young," showing about 30 childhood photos of women in her graduating class.

Sheesh, I thought; that white bow on the kid, big as her head! Leftover Victorian fashion! Dissuading little girls from playing, swimming, running, napping: enforcing feminine passivity.

The reproachful face makes me think this is Aurelia, around 1912.

Yet most little American girls wore ribbons and bows in the 1910s, '20s, and '30s, when grown American women wore them only to keep their hair out of their faces and and food. In the 2020s exhausted parents tug pink elastic bands onto the sensitive skulls of newborns just to show they are female. Such symbols of femininity and innocence can look cute, and some girls did like wearing ribbons and hairbands, or at least didn't hate them. They maybe thought every female wore them. Here's Sylvia, age three, and her mother at Winthrop in 1936:

I thought Sylvia's mother or grandmother forced her to wear ribbons and bows. But Sylvia spent her life wearing ribbons (pink for her wedding; pale blue for the childhood ponytail her mother cut off and archived), plus bandanas and bands that tamed and trained her hair. That famous "dip" over Sylvia's left eye -- worn long before she went blond in 1954 -- needed a hairpin to anchor it. Where's Sylvia's facial scar in the photo below? It's hidden beneath some quite obvious retouching:

Plath's accessories were pivotal. Her hairpins and watch were removed before electroshock. As you know, Ted Hughes tore off Sylvia's hairband and earrings when they first met. Sylvia mourned "my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I will never again find." [1] I'd love a Sylvia Plath fanfiction about her hairband and earrings and how she got them back or lost them forever. 

It's in the nature of ribbons and hairbands to get lost and replaced. But because Sylvia so often wore hairbands we will always know that this bookstore finger puppet/fridge magnet, even if its tag goes missing, is Sylvia Plath.

Finger puppet. They're British! They don't ship to USA.

In Sylvia's poem "Parliament Hill Fields," an ordinary dimestore barrette makes the first appearance of its kind in literature:

One child drops a barrette of pink plastic; / None of them seem to notice. [2]

In the context of the poem, Plath made that moment resound.

While there are some articles and book passages about Sylvia's apparel, I hadn't noticed that about half the photos of her show her hair controlled with bandanas and headbands. I didn't even see that Sylvia so often wore headwear until I saw the monstrous white bow on what I think is Aurelia Schober. [3] That child's forlorn expression and wavy, light-ish hair have me thinking it's her. About Aurelia's childhood we as yet have no photos and know almost nothing.

By 1962 Sylvia's hair grew long enough to be braided and coiled into its own headband; the style is called a "crown braid" or "coronet." Sylvia exulted over hers and is wearing it in the famous "daffodil" color photos taken in April '62. Poet Amanda Gorman in 2021 started a media fuss by wearing a red headband crownlike, as if women aren't supposed to do that. It's regal.

A coronet. How to make one?

[1] Journals, 26 February 1956.

[2] "Parliament Hill Fields," written February 1961.

[3] For really small photos of little Sylvia's really monstrous bows, see the Plath family photos of Sylvia on the endpapers of Letters Home.

What's Missing From Sylvia Plath Archives

You can buy this for $135K USD. Free shipping.

The primary Plath archive at Indiana University's Lilly Library isn't pure Sylvia Plath. It's her mother Aurelia Plath's edit of her accumulation of Sylvia's papers and memorabilia, 3000 pieces spanning Plath's lifetime, plus letters Aurelia wrote and received up to 1974. Generous, remarkable. Yet Plath scholar Dr. Anita Helle nails it when she writes, "It is in the character of the modern archive to be both overflowing and incomplete." [1]

Here then are some of the items I and others see "missing" from Sylvia Plath archives. In print are thousands of pages, millions of words, of Plath's writings, drawn from multiple archives and coaxed out of private collections, so much we can hardly read it all, but it's just human to fixate on what's missing, like the shepherd with 99 sheep.

These exist but can't be accessed: 

Telegram to Ted Hughes, February 1957, from New York's Poetry Center, saying Hughes has won the prize of publication for his manuscript The Hawk in the Rain.

Aurelia Plath's own journals, referenced in Letters Home, were part of a Plath family donation to Yale's Beinecke Library and might someday be available. 

A few letters from Sylvia to Aurelia and to acquaintance Lynne Lawner.

Ted Hughes around 1990 began hinting that he did not destroy Sylvia Plath's last journal. In a recent Substack interview [2], archivist and Plath editor Peter K. Steinberg said he knows where the last two missing journals are, and in an online talk added that they are sealed until 2063. In fact they are sealed until 2059.

Of Aurelia Plath's letters to Sylvia, some survived into the 1970s, because Aurelia had wanted to publish a few in Letters Home. In the 1980s Aurelia told Dr. Richard Larschan that nearly all her letters to Sylvia -- only ten are in archives -- had been burned, but never said Sylvia burned them. I say a better candidate for the "burning" is Olwyn Hughes, Ted's sister and Plath's censorious "literary agent." Larschan said that Aurelia spoke sadly of the loss but said no more. 

Absent from the Lilly archive's file of Sylvia's unpublished short stories are the manuscripts of "The Mummy" and "The Trouble-Making Mother," both written in 1959. Sylvia must have carried them to England. Olwyn Hughes in 1989 asserted that "The Mummy," in her custody, "went missing 20 years ago." [3] Peter K. Steinberg found a fragment of that story at Emory University's Hughes archive and it appears in The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath (795-96).

Where these are, I don't know: 

Some very consequential communications were possibly destroyed soon after creation or receipt because they caused such pain:

-Telegram, February 1963, from Ted Hughes to Sylvia's aunt Dorothy Benotti, saying "Sylvia died yesterday."

-Letter, July 1953, from Harvard University Summer School denying Sylvia admission to Frank O'Connor's short-story-writing class.

Missing: Records from autumn 1958 when Aurelia and siblings Dottie and Frank argued over housing their aging father and spending his cash. Sylvia briefly mentioned the conflict but Aurelia certainly withheld specifics or conveyed them to Sylvia over the telephone.

Missing: Some tell-all letters Sylvia wrote to her in-laws when Ted left her, letters supposedly stolen by one of Ted's girlfriends. [4]

Missing: Hours before her suicide, Sylvia paid her downstairs neighbor for stamps so she might mail some letters, but the letters were in her flat, unsent, when she died. Ted did open and read the letter addressed to Aurelia, because later he advised Aurelia not to read it. Aurelia told Richard Larschan she did not read it.

Lost: 

The draft, written in 1962, of Sylvia's unfinished novel Doubletake, or Double Exposure, about an artist whose husband cheats on her. [5] Ted and his sister Olwyn and Assia Wevill all read this draft, variously said to be "60" or "130" pages, before it was lost. Ted said Aurelia stole it, but that makes no sense because Aurelia couldn't publish or sell it: Ted held the copyright.

Draft pages of Aurelia Plath's attempt at a novel about her mother's girlhood, its working title Teena Marie, are mentioned in a letter Aurelia wrote in 1960 and in an interview from 1975. And any other creative writings she attempted. Sylvia mentions a radio play Aurelia wrote for a contest she did not win.

Plath-Hughes divorce papers.

Sylvia Plath's letters to Chicago confidant Eddie Cohen. 

Most likely never existed:

Unabridged Journals editor Karen V. Kukil says "Sylvia Plath did not keep a journal her senior year at college" (p. 89). Some fans insist this break in journaling is out of character and a journal for 1954-55 must exist. For the curious, Sylvia documented that eventful year in her letters, and many friends such as Nancy Hunter, Peter Davison, Richard Sassoon, and Gordon Lameyer are quoted in Plath biographies or wrote memoirs covering that time.

Of Plath's "second novel of joy and romance," which Aurelia said was titled Hill of Leopards and Sylvia read to her and then burned, no trace has been found.

For sale, if you want to buy them:

Painting, signed by Sylvia Plath [top of page], $135,000, AbeBooks. Painted when Plath was 16. On the same page are about 20 other Sylvia Plath collectibles at scary prices. 

Ebay has a few vintage first-edition copies of The Bell Jar by "Victoria Lucas" (1963) and by "Sylvia Plath" (1966) plus many other Plath-adjacent items. If a book is a "first edition" but also a "second [or later] printing," or minus a jacket, it is of dubious resale value. 

[1] Helle, Anita. "Reading Plath Photographs" in The Unraveling Archives (2007), Helle, ed., p. 184.

[2] Turrell, James, "James Meets Peter K. Steinberg," Substack titled "James on. . . Everything," 4 October 2024. 

[3] Hughes, Olwyn, "Sylvia Plath's Biographers," New York Review, 7 December 1989. 

[4] Trinidad, David,  "Hidden in Plain Sight: On Sylvia Plath's Missing Journals," Plath Profiles, Vol. 3, Autumn 2010.

[5] Clark, Heather, Red Comet, p. 825.

How I Critique Essays About Sylvia Plath

The tears of a Weeping Scholar Tree (Sophora japonica).

Planning a post this week about why Sylvia Plath loved food, I read the essays  "Lucent Figs and Suave Veal Chops: Sylvia Plath and Food" by Lynda K. Bundtzen, anthologized in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath (2022) and "Plath and Food," by Gerard Woodward, published in Sylvia Plath in Context (2013), edited by Dr. Tracy Brain.

I'd avoided for years sitting down with Sylvia Plath in Context, pouting because a book with that title should include an essay about Plath's background and family. Didn't those count as context? To me they do. Please note that I am such a Tracy Brain fan I had her autograph my copy of The Other Sylvia Plath.

They look a bit like Ted and Sylvia.

But I now read "Plath and Food." Poet and novelist Woodward chose to count Plath's references to food and eating, finding that about one-third of Plath's poems refer to one or the other ("black as burnt turkey"). As we say in Missouri, "Well, butter me and call me a biscuit," because I had planned to state that there's no Plath poem about food, although this unpublished early poem, soon to be seen in The Complete Poems, would probably qualify:

(Wondering if Plath was told, 'You will sit here until you eat it'

) 

Woodward wrote with English authority about postwar English recipes Plath lampooned as "Lard and stale bread pie, garnished with pig's feet." Ted Hughes praised her fine cooking but complained when meals were too fancy or too light.

Bundzten's "Lucent Figs and Suave Veal Chops" feasts us on Plath's descriptions of the foods Plath bought, anticipated, cooked, served, and savored, the poet even providing for them dazzling new adjectives. And she packed her face when eating other people's food. Delightful. Maybe Plath would have conquered the  'slicks ' as a food writer. 

Not only a "woman singer," Plath was the offspring of food-service and hospitality workers. Plath's maternal great-grandparents boarded tourists in their Tyrolean pension. Her "Grampy" was a headwaiter. Her German father Otto worked in a New York grocery and a deli. Plath's Viennese grandmother worked in her parents' store and cooked hearty European food and bakery, which Plath replicated in her own household. Plath's uncle Henry's deli in Boston employed several other Schobers, and Henry and three Greenwood uncles scattered across the U.S. were professional waitstaff and restaurant managers.

We picture fin-de-siecle immigrants as miners and subsistence farmers, but the Plaths, Greenwoods, and Schobers arrived from Europe as service workers, white people visible and legible to the white privileged class. This, plus marriages to U.S.-born citizens, created for Sylvia's generation a great advantage: access to those privileges, but only if the kids did everything right.

So Plath's generation was assigned to do everything right. That's the struggle she lived with and wrote about, not about the German-speaking family she felt burdened by and did not live to appreciate beyond its work ethic and its food. Each time I read a new Plath essay, I wonder if it will acknowledge the fullness of her heritage, which shows up in her life in other and more consequential ways.