What's Missing From Sylvia Plath Archives

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

First, 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 speaks truly 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, are in a private collection. 

A few letters from Sylvia to Aurelia and 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 he added that they are sealed until 2063.

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 she 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. 

Conspicuously absent from the Lilly archive's file of Sylvia's unpublished short stories are the manuscripts of "The Mummy" and "The Trouble-Making Mother," written in 1959. 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: Any 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.

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. If you are 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).

I love reading Sylvia Plath scholarship and indulge when its focus intrigues me, or for pleasure. When an essay's research, prose, and arc of argument strike me as flawless, I marvel as I do at Olympic gymnastics. Scholarship is the uneven-bars of language, elegant, defiant, and it finishes with flair and says: How did I do? 

I want to write like that. 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. Food was the family business. 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 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. 

Plath Scholars Who Were Poets

Plath biographer Paul Alexander (photo c. 1990) wrote plays.

The links below lead you to Plath scholars' and critics' own poetry. When I could not find published works I gave documentation. Let's celebrate these academics-critics-biographers and their creative-writing practice, past or present. This list of names doesn't include all of them. First, the poets, in no particular order:

Janet Malcolm, young New Yorker poet

Peter Davison

Edward Butscher [NSFW!]

[Francis] George Steiner

Al Alvarez

Peter K. Steinberg

Amelia Rosselli

David Trinidad

Sandra M. Gilbert

Sarah Ruden  

Emily Van Duyne

Anne Stevenson

Janet Malcolm

Diane Wood Middlebrook

Catherine Rankovic

Rosalind Constable

Aurelia Plath

Who were poets in their Youth:

Karen V. Kukil [she told me]

Anita Helle [The essay "Family Matters" in Northwest Review, Vol. 26:2 (1988), says that teenaged Helle sent her grandaunt Aurelia Plath a booklet of her poems. Aurelia read it and replied with a warning: "There is a price for such sensitivity."]

Gail Crowther

Fiction/Drama Writers:

Dido Milroy Merwin (playwright)

Tracy Brain (novelist)

Heather Clark (novelist)

Paul Alexander (playwright)

Every writer has written in more than one genre. Professionals work through a decade or two before finding their genius: Sylvia Plath is a case in point.

I confess I looked hard for any poems by Olwyn Hughes, whose spite and fury I think sprang from frustrated artistic ambitions.

The Working World

Boston University, class of 1967

Troubled Esther Greenwood "had always looked down on" the city college where her mother taught, because "it was coed, and filled with people who couldn't get scholarships to the big eastern colleges." We now know author Sylvia Plath was imperfectly disguising Boston University, a private  university where her mother Aurelia was a tenure-track professor, although The Bell Jar doesn't say that. And if all we know about its students is Sylvia Plath's impression, we don't know them at all.

Boston University yearbooks for female College of Business graduates 1967 and 1968 gave me names, photos, and hometowns, allowing me to trace about 40 alumnae and mail requests for an interview about Boston University's campus life and its College of Business Secretarial Studies degree program in its waning days, the middle 1960s, when Aurelia taught there.

So far, one graduate responded: Rose Casparro Williams, B.U. College of Business, 1967; M.S. in counseling, Northeastern University. She still has her B.U. transcript, diploma, and class ring. In her hometown, Lowell, Mass., Rose says it was taken for granted that women had to get jobs and support themselves.

Interview with Rose Casparro Williams

You’re one of the Business Education secretarial-program graduates who actually went on to a business education teaching career. After graduating I taught in New Hampshire for three years at a business college, then for twenty years in Medford, Mass., then worked in New Hampshire guidance counseling.

Courses you taught? Typing, shorthand, accounting, business math, business English and Office Practice, where we ran the classroom as an office and the students each had positions with my company, so to speak.

How did you choose a business education major? We started at B.U. at the College of Basic Studies and took our liberal arts courses for the first two years, and then transferred to our specialty school in the B.U. system. One day there was a sign at B.U. looking for young ladies – they didn’t include the guys then – to type papers, for extra cash. Most of the girls could type but the guys couldn’t, and they paid to have their papers typed. It was fun and interesting. We tried to teach the boys how to type, but then it clicked in my mind that teaching was something I could pursue. And I did.

What B.U. courses do you remember? Another typing class, shorthand, and some marketing and accounting classes. I failed economics and had to repeat the class, but the second professor approached it from a mathematics angle and I aced it.

Who was on the faculty? I had Virginia Waller as a typing instructor. She was tough. She made it tough on us so that we really learned from her. The other was Elizabeth Hemmerley. She was excellent as well.

As you planned your career did you ever consult with faculty members about your future or your opportunities? Virginia Wallers used to say she was preparing us for a world of work, whether we chose to be secretaries or to teach business courses. And she would find out what you wanted and steer you toward what classes you needed or how to approach things so you would be either a good secretary or a good teacher. If you were going to teach, you were going to do it well.

Do you remember your shorthand? My group of friends -- we were referred to as the "Uneven Dozen," because the thirteen of us hung out together. One of them lives now in London, and we still communicate back and forth and do it in shorthand. We still do!

I was mystified by shorthand. Like, wow: I can do this! We used to get a magazine every month that was tied in with one of our courses, a whole magazine in shorthand, and it had a story in shorthand, and we couldn’t wait to get that magazine to read the next installment.

Did people look down on you for studying secretarial work rather than studying to be a business executive? I would always say to them, if you know how to type you could always get a job no matter what. And from there you can go anywhere. If you have an accounting background, that’s a door opening.

What swayed you to the educational rather than the secretarial track? I can remember my mother telling me that when we used to play school I wouldn’t let anybody else be the teacher. It was either that or nursing, and I gravitated more toward teaching. I can’t say teaching is magical, but it is. When you teach a concept and they finally get it, it’s like, wow, I gave them something they can hold onto and take with them.

Tell me more about The Uneven Dozen. We were all in business ed, and all commuter students. I came from Lowell, 45 or 50 miles from B.U. We talked about our classes and the instructors, and all hoped to find a teaching position close by and not lose contact with each other. Our goals were to get through school, graduate, and take the next step of finding a position, a job. Some of the girls said, we’re gonna find a husband, find a husband, and two of my friends married, but the rest took time to work before settling down.

Did you have  a scholarship, or did you pay your way? My parents helped me out and I worked during the summers and I also worked for a temporary agency, and for two summers in Bedford, Massachusetts, for the aerospace industry.  There was also a company called Miter that did government work, and I worked for them one summer.

I can't believe you commuted 45 miles each way every school day. It wasn’t bad. We got to know the people on the train who were going to Boston to work, and they were delightful. On the days they knew we were having exams, nobody on the train spoke, it was very quiet, because they saw us studying our books. They really knew us. Lots of times they would bring us coffee or doughnuts or a little something. We got to know them very well over the course of our commuting time. And a couple of times, like, if we forgot to buy a pass – instead of a daily ticket, we would buy a pass, it was easier -- the conductor would just let us take the train and get our pass later.

The Armchair Nazi

About Aurelia Plath's opinion of Sylvia's poem "Daddy" which so shocked readers when it appeared in Ariel (1965 UK; 1966 USA): "It was the poem that sold the book." Strangers phoned Aurelia, asking "Was Otto Plath really a Nazi?" Aurelia denied it, and truly, Otto was not, but there are clues that he behaved like one. Sylvia recalled in a journal entry (8 December 1958) which is famously bitter about her upbringing, that Otto had "heiled Hitler in his own home."

I don't think Sylvia made that up.

Like Aurelia, we like to deny that Otto ever heiled Hitler, but the context makes me think he did, at least once, and available examples of his pacifism are limited to when there were uniforms or insects around. Aurelia also reported that he said he'd take up arms, but only in defense.

Aurelia in Letters Home and personal letters, and Sylvia in poems, described Otto as autocratic, verbally and loudly abusive, obsessed with control. I think he was like modern-day would-be domestic dictators who raise their fists in solidarity with the meanest-looking movie villain, the ill-mannered, the assassin, the big bruiser, the dominator with the power to punish and destroy. And in the late 1930s, during the two-plus years it took him to die, Otto Plath, coughing and growing thin, barely got through his day of teaching before "collapsing" on the couch in his study. 

I had a husband who took two and a half years to die of esophageal cancer, and as he lost weight, height, and hair he only got meaner, mouthier, and more controlling, and fried himself pounds of forbidden bacon and ham. Late in his illness came a startling change of spirit: He began preaching about Jesus. 

Unaccustomed to, in fact flailing in his weakness, he tried to align with whatever power was most available, no matter how bizarre or out of character.

In the poem "Daddy" there is also the husband-is-a-Nazi factor ("I made a model of you") that critics ignored and Aurelia identified only in a marginal note. And I find Sylvia's introduction to the "Daddy" BBC recording a clue to her parents' marriage.

While fading away, Otto Plath heard on the radio Hitler's barking in German, and maybe Otto raised his fist and heiled in solidarity not exactly with Hitler or the Nazi party -- Otto left Germany 20 years before the party was formed -- but with the desire to rule the world, although all he could rule was his household.

Jerks know they are being jerks and it makes them hate themselves, and those around them, even more. Aurelia told McLean Hospital that Otto never yelled at the children until the last year of his life. I think that was enough time to yell. Remember, Sylvia and Warren barely knew a healthy father.

And by being ill and refusing treatment, and dying, Otto displaced his children as the family's focus and power center.

Fifteen Posts I Haven't Written

After a six-day work week, the working girl gets the memo "We missed you last Sunday at Sunday School." Source unknown.

I am stocked up with two years' worth of research for new posts. Here's a selection, in capsule form:

"Anxiety is Terror": Sylvia Plath thought her mother's anxiety was cowardice, but labeling anxiety a disease and a personal weakness, and medicating it, disguises systemic threats which for very good reasons cause chronic terror and dread.

"A Place for Mom": Sylvia's mad grandmother Ernestine Plath probably preferred life at an insane asylum over wifehood and motherhood.

"Aurelia Plath's Archive": Aurelia curated the 3000-piece Plath mss. II archive at Indiana University's Lilly Library so we see only what Aurelia wanted us to see. What is missing?

"Aurelia the Peacenik": Oddly, "peace" was an important value in the family of a famously troubled writer.

"Herr des Hauses": Examples in period literature show Otto's dictatorial ways at home were the norm in Prussia.

"How I Read Essays About Sylvia Plath": I read critical essays and biographies way differently than before.

"I Am An American": How Sylvia and family were entangled in the first-generation-American assimilation process.

"It Has a Gothic Shape": obstacles to Sylvia's learning German.

"Miss Mucky-Muck and Lady Jane": Nicknames and labels people hung on Esther Greenwood and on Sylvia.

"Rude Speculations: When Your Rival is Your Mom"

"Sylvia and Her Family's Secrets"

"Sylvia Plath, Drama Queen"

"Sylvia Plath, Harriet Rosenstein, and Ms. Magazine"

"Visage de Aurelia Schober Plath": Probably will be a video.

"When Nervous Breakdowns Were Cool": They were. 

Ready for a Comeback . . .

Now feeling heartened enough to think about Plath, I wonder what were Sylvia's real first words after her three-day coma in her family's basement?

The Bell Jar's Esther Greenwood in Chapter 14 says that in the "thick, warm, furry dark" of unconsciousness, she heard a voice call  "Mother!" I buy that, chiefly because when Mrs. Greenwood first visits her daughter in the hospital she tells Esther, "They said you asked for me."

Aurelia Plath in Letters Home claims Sylvia's very first words were "Oh, no!" and that in the hospital Sylvia "said weakly, 'It was my last act of love.'" But that sounds like something Aurelia made up and put in Sylvia's mouth as a noble excuse for trying to kill herself and as proof of daughterly devotion. (For the telltale markers of Aurelia's fictional "ideal scenes," see this recent post, "It's Aurelia's Story and She's Sticking To It.")

Gordon Lameyer in his unpublished memoir Dear Sylvia wrote that Sylvia's first words were, "Do we still own the house?" Lameyer, then Sylvia's current boyfriend, hadn't been present, so he heard about this secondhand. I can't imagine that during her own medical emergency the house was Sylvia's overriding concern, but she might have said it a day or two into hospitalization.

Sylvia in her journals and letters did not specify what her first words were. I am betting that as she was first dragged from her hiding place, she said "Oh, no!" I am also betting that as helpless and semiconscious she cried out "Mother!" when a "man with a chisel" forced open one of her eyes and tried to make her see.

I Interrupt This Program

I find it hard to concentrate on things Plath or Plath-adjacent when my country -- the good old USA -- is being torn to shreds by madmen. I think of these events as the old white males' last hurrah. They remember an all-white, all-Christian, women-stayed-home world that they imagine they once lived in. Long insulated by their privileges and power they can't bear to share them. They've been seething this whole time.

There is so much to fight.

This presidential administration is attacking universities, freedom of speech, and the individual academics it can pin some kind of blame on. The administration is defunding libraries. It wants to control the national archives. I can't do everything, but will fight for libraries and archives and museums, and librarians and archivists, with every tool I have. I've already participated in a "Data Rescue" at a university library, preserving online databases this administration might decide to "scrub."

You know what is happening. 

If you have a website or blog, please back it up.

There are more Plath matters and I hope to SOON return to writing about them. I will accept guest posts about Plath and Plath-adjacent topics, should you write one of 1000 words or fewer.

Meanwhile, please forgive me interrupting this blog. I would rather leave it blank than write a post that is less than rigorous and heartfelt.

My email: platheducational@gmail.com, and there are 241 posts already here.

"The Shadow Knows"

From Sylvia Plath's short story "The Shadow" (1959):

"Prepared as I was for the phenomenon of evil in the world, I was not ready to have it expand in this treacherous fashion, like some uncontrollable fungus, beyond the confines of half-hour radio programs, comic book covers, and Saturday afternoon double features, to drag out past all confident predictions of a smashing-quick finish. 

"I had an ingrained sense of the powers of good protecting me: my parents, the police, the FBI, the American Armed Forces; even those symbolic champions of Good from a cloudier hinterland -- The Shadow, Superman, and the rest. Not to mention God himself. Surely, with these ranked round me, circle after concentric circle, reaching to infinity, I had nothing to fear. Yet I was afraid. Clearly, in spite of my assiduous study of the world, there was something I had not been told; some piece to the puzzle I did not have in hand."

I paid no attention to the above passage until recently.

"The Shadow" is an anti-hero detective character who gets revenge on evildoers. He starred in a radio show popular from the 1930s until 1954, remembered for its famous taglines, including "crime does not pay." From 1937 Orson Welles voiced the character [listen]. Young Sylvia Plath and her brother Warren were among the Shadow's millions of fans.

Plath spun up the story from a childhood memory: "Feeling of badness in the world unconquerable by good; war, death, disease; horror radio programs." [Journals, 28 December 1958].

"The Shadow," The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath, P. Steinberg, ed., pp. 382-389.

Sylvia Plath and Phyllis McGinley

"I rise to defend/ The quite possible She."

 Of course no one like this could write serious poetry:

"When Phyllis McGinley, a pleasant matron of 60 who could pass for 45 and does not try to, a woman who just misses being pretty and does not care, presents herself at the White House, she will find herself on a program that includes only one other poet —Mark Van Doren. Asked to recite one of her own poems, she chose "In Praise of Diversity," written for a Columbia University commencement, which ends:

Praise what conforms and what is odd,

Remembering, if the weather worsens

Along the way, that even God

Is said to be three separate Persons. 

Then upright or upon the knee,

Praise Him that by His Courtesy, 

For all our prejudice and pains, 

Diverse His Creature still remains." [1]

McGinley was Time magazine's cover story on 18 June 1965. President Lyndon Johnson was hosting a White House arts festival at which poet Robert Lowell had for political reasons declined to appear. [2, 3]

As for the poem "In Praise of Diversity," McGinley seriously meant diversity of the type that's topical right now.

In 1958 Sylvia Plath listed her competitors for the title of Poetess of America: Sappho and Dickinson; among the living, "poetic godmothers" Edith Sitwell and Marianne Moore. Then she added, "Phyllis McGinley is out -- light verse; she's sold herself." [Journals, 360] Today we wonder why she was in Plath's pantheon at all.

Long forgotten, McGinley (1905-78) was the U.S. mid-century's most popular "housewife poet" who sang in rhyme the joys of being a wife and mother in the leafy suburbs, but also of the annoyance when someone bought and leveled the leafy lot across the street. Genuine wit and fiendish technical skill got her elected to the National Academy of Arts and Letters and won her the 1961 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Times Three. It was the first Pulitzer ever for a book of light verse.

Back then "light verse" meant "domestic" poems written by a woman from a woman's point of view, suitable as day-brighteners in women's magazines. While Adrienne Rich in her first two books of poems (1951, 1955) wrote "he" when she meant "she" or "I," McGinley ran with the feminine pronouns, writing bestselling poetry books and children's books and collecting royalties from multiple publishers, and without any doubt influencing Sylvia Plath.

McGinley, born in Oregon, having sold some poems to New York magazines moved there in 1929. The New Yorker prodded her: "We are taking your poem, but why do you sing the same sad songs all lady poets sing?" [4] McGinley's housewife persona became Sylvia's business model: wife, mother, and New Yorker poet publishing in litmags as well as the slicks, writing children's classics, recording for the BBC. McGinley's rural childhood and her urban life in the "threadbare" 1930s and '40s made New York City's suburbs in the 1950s look like paradise. To Sylvia's generation the same suburbs looked and felt like hell.

Maybe that's why Sylvia thought McGinley had "sold herself." But the author of the one McGinley biography I could find, Linda Wagner-Martin, points out that McGinley's poems complicated the "housewife" ideal. What she wrote was barbed:

[From "Carol with Variations, 1936"]:

Oh little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie;

Your flocks are folded in to sleep, and sleep your little ones.

Behold there is a Star again that climbs the eastern sky,

And seven million living men are picking up their guns.

A review from 1954 of one of McGinley's books opens:

McGinley told Newsweek, "I'm so sick of this 'Phyllis McGinley, suburban housewife and mother of two' . .  . That's only an eighth or a tenth of my work. The rest is different. There's a hell of a lot of straight social criticism." [4]

When the nation's most influential newsweekly, readership then peaking at about 17 million, featured McGinley on its cover [5], the news angle was that McGinley was countering author Betty Friedan's very scary call for liberating legions of unhappy housewives. McGinley could be relied on to defend motherhood and housewifery as noble and fulfilling occupations.

She didn't win this round and in the 1960s retreated into writing about the lives of saints. Less than a year after that cover story, on June 10, 1966, Time's book section published a hyper-sensational review of the U.S. edition of Ariel, introducing "compulsive writer" and suicidal "literary dragon" Sylvia Plath, who eclipsed McGinley -- and other Plath foremothers and influences -- seemingly forever.

[1] 1954 Columbia University Phi Beta Kappa poem. Read the full "In Praise of Diversity" here.

[2] "The Telltale Hearth," Time Magazine, 18 June 1965.

[3] "A Day at the White House," New York Review of Books, 15 July 1965.

[4] https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/mcginley_phyllis/ 

[5] Time then had a substantial and regular Books section, publishing reviews and profiles of authors, often poets.

N.B. Sylvia might have borrowed the McGinley poem title "Six Nuns in Snow" for her first drafts of "Nuns in Snow," retitled "Sheep in Fog."

New Video: "Sylvia Plath's Neighborhood"

I just posted an all-new video of my guided tour of Plath sites, featuring Sylvia Plath's former family home at 26 Elmwood Road in Wellesley (4:43). Find the video here: https://youtu.be/SmRDStePDlc

My host and guide was Dr. Richard Larschan, neighbor and friend of Aurelia Plath from the mid-1970s until her death in 1994. His memories and opinions are controversial; just remember that you are listening to someone Aurelia found companionable. The original Elmwood Road house is so small you can't believe that three adults and two adolescents once shared it. Larschan (professor of English, emeritus) and his wife Laurence (she's French) drove me around that August day and finally to their house and the beach on the dreamlike South Shore of Massachusetts, complete with sand castle.

It took me six months to accept that the final film would be imperfect, and to feel convinced that what's more important is that it is unique.

The Meaning of "Carbon Paper"

Carbon-copy color hierarchy, National Cash Register Co., 1953

Sylvia Plath's poem "Insomniac" begins:

The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,

Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars

Letting in the light, peephole after peephole-- 

Greetings from your mid-century U.S.-business-office material-culture antiquarian. In 2025 we have photocopiers and "transfer paper," but what Sylvia Plath meant by "carbon paper" are very thin single blank 8.5 x 11-inch sheets, often midnight blue ("blueblack"), and brittle as nori. One side of each sheet is sticky with a blend of dark ink and wax. Placing the ink side face down between two blank sheets of paper and writing on the top sheet creates a duplicate called a "carbon copy," or "a carbon" for short.

To get the most from every sheet, frugal typists re-used carbon paper three, four, or even five or six times, until its ink was depleted and the sheet so fragile (like toasted nori) that using the typewriter key for "." punched little holes in it.

Carbon paper has its place in Plath studies.

The carbon paper's ink side preserved a mirror image of any typewriting. Because of this, some years ago archivist Peter K. Steinberg was able to retrieve two previously unknown Sylvia Plath poems, "Megrims" and "To a Refractory Santa Claus," from carbon paper in the Lilly Library.

As with other documents, for business and professional transactions carbon copies weren't acceptable. Sylvia learned this in 1958 when celebrated poet Marianne Moore, a business-school graduate [1], returned Sylvia's carbon-copied poems with a "tart and acidy" note about how typing was such a chore. Plath grieved her "great & stupid error -- sending carbons to the American Lady of Letters," [2] and she and Ted Hughes hated Moore for the rest of their lives.

For letters or manuscripts in triplicate or quadruplicate, the typist sandwiched sheets of carbon paper between three or four sheets of blank paper. Rolling this sandwich evenly around the typewriter's platen was a feat. The copies were to be systematically color-coded, indicating the document's urgency, importance, or routing. Carbons of business documents mostly began with white paper (often ultra-light "onionskin"), then green, yellow, pink, and "gold" (mustard): all bilious, unwearable pastels now seen only on pharmaceuticals.

[1] Moore "completed the business course at Carlisle (PA) Commercial College in 1910, [and] taught stenography and typewriting at Carlisle Indian School." Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2004), Gioia, Mason, and Schoerke, eds., p. 227.

[2] Journals, 17 July 1958.

It's Aurelia's Story and She's Sticking To It

Aurelia's indignant "Fran X'ed this! out!"

I guess Aurelia Plath decided if daughter Sylvia could make shit up, she could too, although without Sylvia's talent and her years of practice and tutoring by some of the best living teachers and writers. Mentors too paved Sylvia's way to writing what her mother experienced as lies, half-truths, and personal attacks on her mothering and character, which Sylvia's thousands of readers devoutly believed.

Undaunted by the odds, Aurelia spent the rest of her long life trying to neutralize what Sylvia had written about her, aiming mostly at The Bell Jar's unsympathetic portrayal of mother figure "Mrs. Greenwood." One thing Aurelia tried was making up or fictionalizing events from her own life and Sylvia's. Sylvia had got away with it; why shouldn't she?

The single largest body of Aurelia's writings, of those available in archives, is what she wrote in her own self-defense.

Aurelia was a competent writer and most of what she wrote is true enough, but with a critical eye one can tell when Aurelia Plath wrote a fiction because it is badly written. Expert editor Fran McCullough deleted several anecdotes Aurelia wanted in her preface or the headnotes for Letters Home (1975) -- Aurelia's project to prove that she had been a good, liberal mother and not a conventional Mrs. Greenwood who made her daughter suicidal.

Aurelia Plath saved the inserts McCullough deleted and Smith College holds the carbon copies. The following example, set in 1953, is labeled in pencil "Basis of the Bell Jar." Aurelia wanted us to know that while Sylvia recovered from her suicide attempt, Aurelia met with psychologist Dr. Paul, a female, for regular counseling sessions, where unlike Mrs. Greenwood she was humble and contrite:

I asked [Dr. Paul] where I had been at fault, what in myself I should change to help my daughter, what I could do to help her when visiting her and when she returned home. 

She exclaimed, "My dear, you have been through a most harrowing experience, and you are doing magnificently! Follow your own instincts; they are sound. In Sylvia's present depression, no matter what you do or say just now, it will be wrong. Let her talk, but don't take issue with her present misconceptions."

In four sentences Dr. Paul absolved Aurelia of all blame for her daughter's problems by blaming the daughter's depression.

I call these "set pieces" or "idealized scenes," sometimes repeated in print or in Aurelia's letters. The more fictional, the worse the writing, especially the stilted dialogue. To her credit Aurelia was very bad at lying.

McCullough rejected too another set piece: Sylvia at Court Green reading to Aurelia excerpts from a draft of her lost, "happy novel of joy and romance," which only Aurelia ever heard of or saw. Aurelia in this scene put words in Sylvia's mouth -- why not? Sylvia had put words in hers! Sylvia explains that her novel in manuscript is "autobiographically based, more or less -- facts serve Art, you know." She then tells her mother:

"I feel I have been living a series of novels, really, and this is, so far, the most exciting part." She paused, then added, slowly and thoughtfully, "It is life seen through the eyes of health," a statement I did not fully understand until after her death and after my reading of The Bell Jar.

Signals of falsity: Cringey dialogue, adverbs, Sylvia's two acknowledgements that she knew The Bell Jar fused facts with fiction and its narrator was not normal but sick, things Aurelia tried for twenty-five years to prove to her critics. In set pieces Aurelia is always the only witness. They include exposition and unnecessary detail, different iterations, and emendations on the typescript:

On July 10, 1962, I saw Sylvia toss this manuscript tear apart this Ms., section by section, into a huge bonfire she had built and set to blazing at the far end of the courtyard.

Fictionalizing is not illegal. The only thing it should be is believable. Making it so requires multiple skills harder to acquire than it might seem.

Let me say here that everyone involved in Sylvia Plath's story lied and edited events, as humans do. Fran McCullough carefully steered Aurelia through Letters Home and then Ted Hughes's hectic edit of The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982; by then Harper & Row had let McCullough go). Those closest to Sylvia, husband Ted and mother Aurelia, when exposed, fought back: Ted with edits and rearrangements of Sylvia's works and finally, with Birthday Letters, poems styling Sylvia's suicide as inevitable. In archives she created, Aurelia pointedly left notes for future scholars to see and analyze. That she left such notes was just another count against her.

I'll discuss this more later. It will save you ten years of reading Aurelia's notes and letters.

[1] Sylvia Plath Collection IX Aurelia Plath, Letters Home [book] Commentary by AP, folder 67, Smith College Libraries.

No Post This Week

 "Something's going around," it is said here; whether flu A or flu B. I will return to posting soon.

Plath and Sleeping Pills

Sylvia Plath mentioned sleeping pills in numerous letters. The pills were barbiturates, some available over-the-counter.

From Sylvia Plath's Letters, Volume 1:

28 June 1949 to Aurelia Plath: "I really don't need any sleeping pills by the time the day is over." (Plath at the time is 16 years old.)

29 October 1950 to Aurelia: "I have taken a hot bath and a sleeping pill"

3 December 1950 to Aurelia: "I'm going to take two little pills and be asleep by nine o'clock"

31 January 1951 to Aurelia: "I guess I'll take sleeping pills till after exams are over"

9 May 1951 to Ann Davidow: "swallowing a handful of cold pills"

18 October 1951 to Aurelia: "It's wonderful how comfortable strong nosedrops, hot compresses and penicillin and sleeping pills can make a sinus sufferer."

20 October 1951 to Aurelia: "I was dosed with pirivine [nose drops] and pyribenzamine [antihistamine] and sleeping pills"

3 March 1952 to Aurelia: "I took two sleeping pills two hours apart, as you said"

(Plath takes sleeping pills prescribed by her aunt and family doctor, Francesca Racioppi, M.D., for most of spring semester 1953. That summer, Racioppi prescribes for Plath a stronger sleeping pill. In August, Plath overdoses on sleeping pills and barely survives.)

28 December 1953 to Eddie Cohen: "I became immune to increased doses of sleeping pills"

27 October 1955 to Elinor Friedman: "Gone are the good old Smith days with cocaine, codeine, and sleeping pills" [1]

Journals, 5 November 1957: "First I couldn't sleep without pills, now I can"

In Letters, Volume 2, as Sylvia's marriage falls apart she becomes addicted to sleeping pills and knows it.

29 September 1962 to Kathy Kane: "I can't sleep without pills."

12 October 1962 to Aurelia: "Every morning when my sleeping pills wear off, I am up about 5, in my study with coffee, writing like mad."

16 October 1962 to Aurelia: "I live on sleeping pills"

14 December 1962, to Dorothy Benotti: "I hope to get off sleeping pills"

26 December 1962, to Daniel and Helga Huws: "I am going to the doctor this week to see if he can help me get off those sleeping pills"

4 February 1963, to Ruth Beuscher: "I am living on sleeping pills and nerve tonic"

Because most of Sylvia's mentions of sleeping pills are in letters to her mother, I think her mother, who herself took sleeping pills, got her started on them. There are very few studies about Plath and drugs.

[1] U.S. pharmacies legally sold cocaine and the morphine derivative codeine most of the 20th century, at first over-the-counter and then by prescription. Sylvia Plath was prescribed cocaine for sinus pain.

A Talented Mother

Aurelia Schober's college classmates read, sort of sub rosa, the pop-psychology book The Nervous Housewife (1920) by neurologist/psychiatrist Abraham Myerson. He wrote:

One of the commonest and saddest transformations is the change of the gay, laughing girl, radiant with love and all aglow with the thought of union with her man, into the housewife of a decade -- complaining, fatigued, and disillusioned.

This was an open secret, but no one had ever put it quite that way before. I thought of Aurelia Schober, her college class's valedictorian, yearbook editor, German-language actress, voted by her peers "Most Studious," with a dashing Austrian boyfriend who was one of the century's greatest engineers, and in her sophomore year her headshot was published in The Boston Transcript:

Aurelia, 19, in The Boston Transcript, 12 January 1926.

Much of Aurelia's creativity and spunk got shell-shocked and died during an almost-nine-year marriage to human land mine Otto Plath, a behavioral scientist, at home a thrower of tantrums and a monocrat. The lasting effect on Aurelia was perpetual anxiety. I believe that from her marriage and husband's needless death Aurelia had PTSD. The day after his death she signed a contract drawn up by her eight-year-old daughter never to marry again. And never did.

 

Then Aurelia had to support her children on a single woman's salary. Good thing she had prepared herself with a master's degree and let her parents do live-in childcare. From their births Aurelia supported her children's education and growth in every possible way, was positive and honest with them: Aurelia was a talented mother.

Aurelia Plath couldn't become a writer but seems to have used a surviving part of her dramatic talent and resonant voice to read aloud to family and friends Sylvia's and Warren's letters from college. Her children knew their letters were shared, and wrote accordingly.

 

Aurelia also used part of her talent for her 29-year university teaching career: Teaching can feel like performance, and the show must go on whether your stomach aches or your daughter killed herself. In retirement she edited and published a bestselling book of her talented daughter's letters and recited her talented daughter's poetry on video.

 

Abraham Myerson (1881-1948), who thought socio-cultural pressures triggered addictions and mental illness, published other books for laymen such as The Foundation of Personality, and one of his dozens of papers appeared in The American Journal of Insanity, later renamed and still known as The American Journal of Psychiatry.

I Am the Jew

Family photo, 1920; the baby is my future stepfather.

After proving that Sylvia Plath was not a Jew -- her maternal ancestry is 100 percent Central European Roman Catholic -- it turns out I was the Jew.

Found out my maternal great-grandmother's surname was Goldmann.

Of course I am not a real Jew unless my great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother practiced Judaism. Grandma and Mom were so Polish Catholic they pinned hankies on our heads. In 1886 Josepha Goldmann in Prussia married a Polish Catholic, the church wedding record giving her maiden name as "Josepha Goldmann alias Wlodarczyk." "Alias" is so very unusual in such records, and the handwriting so cramped, that a searcher before me transcribed Josepha's name as "Goldmannalias." [1]

My mother had once said we were really Jews and I rolled my eyes because European immigrant families, including the Plaths, often tell of a Jew in the family, just as longtime U.S. residents claim Cherokee Indian blood. Furthermore Mom said that her father's older brother, resentfully serving in Russia's army, stole the Czar's horses. Nearly every family has its horse thief.

Genealogy is a hobby. I've been at it about a year, taking lessons in the software, learning as I go, and I know that Jewishness is passed down through mothers.

Then I looked up online why a Jewish girl might get a Polish alias and marry a Polish Catholic named Ludovicus Ziolkowski and have two kids and then emigrate to Chicago and have ten more kids before disappearing from official records. Maybe she ran away. Ludvik, an iceman, then remarried, siring a total of two sons and 14 daughters, two named Josephine. My grandmother was the one born in 1896, according to pages I tore from the family bible.

I told my sister we had a Jewish female ancestor, and she told her daughter, who thanks to other people's research can now also qualify as a Daughter of the American Revolution because her father's 6X great-grandfather was a captain in the Revolutionary War. My father's family records were destroyed in World War I, but new databases of World War II Nazi Persecutees and Displaced Persons let me follow his progress from camp to camp to Ellis Island. Dad had us raised as Eastern Orthodox Christians, whose priests blessed us with herbal incense and holy water, and we had all sorts of rituals, some cognate with Jewish ones.

What was different now that I was Jewish? Earlier in life I might have cared more. I respect Judaism and Jewish authors, the latest Sylvia-Plath-related book I read being Alfred Kazin's lyrical depth-charge A Walker in the City (1951) about growing up Jewish in Brooklyn. Kazin was Sylvia's teacher. She had to have read the book. Her memoir "Ocean 1212-W" has similarities.

But back at the family tree some days later I saw I had identified the 1896 daughter named Josephine Ziolkowski with her father Ludvik through the 1900 U.S. census. Polish baptismal records show my genuine grandmother was born in 1893, to Francizek, not to Ludvik, and no Ludvik, no Jew. I had also confused Francizek's wife Mary Kotwica (b. 1864) with another Mary Kotwica (b. 1865), both emigrants to Chicago and both buried in the same cemetery.

I cleaned up my family tree, merging and purging and trying to match genuine great-grandfather Francizek, b. 1858, with the 30 or so "Francis" "Franz" "Franciscus" and "Frank" Ziolkowskis born around then. Not finding him I couldn't find his parents so couldn't ascertain whether Ludvik who married the Jew might be Francizek's relative.

Then I double-checked the name Goldmann and learned that "Goldmann" with two "n"s is a German name denoting a goldsmith or gilder. The Jewish version of the name is Goldman.

So Josepha was not a Jew who masqueraded as Polish -- as some girls did -- but a Germanic woman who assumed a Polish alias so as not to be mistaken for a Jew. Which is what Sylvia Plath's immigrant grandparents did when they anglicized their surname, Grunwald, to Greenwood.

I spent hours, having once again to learn: Guesses are always wrong.

I make mistakes. But this one -- the very idea -- confirmed for me that I could use a vacation.

[1] "Alias" in Polish names sometimes signifies a pseudonym chosen to disguise political activity.

Aurelia Plath's Political Group

On 9 January 1953 Sylvia Plath, her leg in a cast, wrote from Smith College to her mother that she was less depressed after persuading the college to let her audit the science courses she so dreaded that she had talked suicide. Meanwhile, in a nation battered by the Red Scare and war in Korea and the new hydrogen bomb, with Eisenhower’s inauguration days away, Sylvia’s mother Aurelia Plath, Boston University professor, scribbled on the envelope’s verso:

subjects questions for political discussion group

1. religion

2. Are sororities and fraternities democratic.

3. Is liberal education desirable for everybody.

4. college education open to all / should a college education be public as one will be to high school students?

5. heredity or environment

6. are students taking advantage of the opportunities around them.

7. what will be religion’s should place [sic] in the modern world.

8. is there a course or lessons needed for college education work.

9. communism and how it affects us.

10. current events

11. the American negro [1]

 

Because “religion” and “sororities and fraternities” top the list, the political discussion group was for college students, possibly fellow Unitarian congregants or at Boston University where Aurelia taught. “The American negro” as a topic implies all group members would be white. A subject “1” on the list implies that the group had not yet formed or met.

 

Was this group Aurelia’s own brainstorm, or are these notes, written in Gregg shorthand, from a planning meeting? Regardless, the list opens a window onto Aurelia Plath’s politics.

 

Most discussion items center on Aurelia’s areas of expertise: religion, education, college life.  Topics 2 through 8 are formulated as questions, most with her own answers implicit -- yet open for discussion. Topics 9 through 11, nationwide and nonspecific, conclude the list because they were either too explosive for initial group discussions or rearmost in Aurelia's awareness. Yet the plan to start the group is activist. And the agenda does not sound prescriptive.

 

Biographers assume that Aurelia voted for Eisenhower in 1952 because Sylvia supposed her mother had, but that’s not proof, and "Republican" back then didn't mean the insanity it means now. Aurelia wrote in Letters Home that her Austrian-born parents “believed [in] every word their idol, Theodore Roosevelt, ever wrote or uttered" and voted Republican ever after. Why? Possibly because Roosevelt was “the only candidate in whose veins flows German blood, who has received part of his education in Germany,” said the German-American Roosevelt League. [2] Otto Plath and his first wife Lydia registered to vote as Progressives in 1912 when Roosevelt's Progressive party ran him for re-election on a very liberal platform.

 

Aurelia's political discussion group never met. A crisis erupted in Aurelia’s household: Her mother was diagnosed with gastric cancer. Aurelia took summer 1953 off from teaching to care for her mother, and Sylvia, disheartened by a month as a guest editor in New York City, chose to spend July and August at home and became suicidally depressed.

 

[1.] Sylvia Plath to Aurelia Plath, 9 January 1953, Lilly Library.

[2.] Gable, J. The Bull Moose Years, Kennikat, 1978. When Roosevelt was 15 his parents sent him and two siblings to Dresden, Germany for five months, to learn German. Roosevelt did not become fluent.