Aurelia Plath's Childhood

1 Roslyn Place, Jamaica Plain, built 1910. Aurelia wrote that family visits to her uncle here were among "the sweeteners of my childhood."

Only two sources about Aurelia Plath's childhood presently exist: Aurelia's own narrative in Letters Home and Beth Hinchliffe's unpublished Plath biography for which Aurelia was a primary source. The latter is painful reading, yet rings true:

. . . the family was disciplined into formal Germanic obedience, an almost martyr-like acceptance of hard work and self-deprivation . . . 

. . . acquiescent exterior . . . nursing the old grievances, remembering the persecutions and loneliness, seeing the world in terms of black and white and expecting the worst . . .  

Aurelia in other interviews and letters says nothing about her childhood and little about her parents, with whom she lived for forty years. Unless there is more in the Plath Family archive soon to open at Beinecke Library we must say Aurelia withheld her childhood for a reason.

The Letters Home preface says Aurelia's immigrant parents, the Schobers, headed by her father Frank, sent Aurelia to school speaking only German. Did he have no inkling she'd be treated like a freak? Frank spoke English. If he wasn't ignorant, what was he thinking? "From that time on," Aurelia wrote, "we always spoke English at home." 

Given English, Aurelia bloomed at school, but home was no picnic. In Letters Home Aurelia said she had no playmates, not saying her parents shut out the neighbors. In her book's one full childhood scene Aurelia's father spanks her. He then begs her forgiveness. The Hinchliffe manuscript says Aurelia hid her anger and never forgot and was always slow to forgive. 

Frank and Aurelia Greenwood Schober were married ten months when daughter Aurelia Frances was born in 1906. Being named for both parents suggests she was conceived and born to prove a point. Baby Aurelia's mother, eighteen, had married without her wife-beating father's permission. Her sisters spited their father too: One had a baby at fifteen and the other married an African-American. Burdened with a child, the Schobers waited five years to have another. They never prospered -- Letters Home styles Frank, who was a waiter and restaurant manager, as a "cost accountant" -- and lived with widowed Aurelia and their grandchildren. Spite begat spite: After her mother died in 1956, Aurelia ejected her father from her house and went to Europe where Sylvia was surprised to see her careworn mother suddenly as effervescent as a girl.

Hinchliffe's manuscript describes the Schober household as insular and humorless, so it is no wonder that Aurelia escaped into the alternate reality of books, preferring self-help and stories of survival. In summer 1918 Aurelia's family moved from Jamaica Plain to a remote landspit with the ocean front and back. We know why: In December 1917 the wartime U.S. declared Austro-Hungarians like the Schobers "enemy aliens" just like Germans. That the Schobers were citizens did not matter: The local "gang" of kids called Aurelia "spy-face" and pushed her off the schoolbus, and Sylvia remembered hearing from her mother that the kids threw stones. 

So we know approximately how much Letters Home sanitized Aurelia's childhood. If there isn't any text, maybe the archive's family photos will open a new route into her childhood and biography.

Dispelling Ignorance About Aurelia Plath

Progress. From The Making of Sylvia Plath (2024) by Carl Rollyson.

Before disposing of Kate Moses's Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath (2003) I wanted to share a scene from its Chapter 27, set on a fictional 21 December 1962, a week after the real Sylvia and her children moved into a historic London flat. On the real 14th the real Sylvia wrote her mother Aurelia, "Safely in Yeats's house!" and that she'd never been so happy; on the real 21st she wrote her mother about her new furnishings and: "I spent the rest of Mrs. P's clothes money & feel & look like a million." "Just had two long bee poems accepted by the Atlantic." "I am out of Ted's shadow." "I have never been so happy in my life."

By contrast, Wintering has Sylvia on the 21st collect-calling her mother from a phone booth near a schoolyard. Fictional Aurelia had cabled saying Sylvia must call; it was urgent. Their conversation:

. . . ."So you're all right, sweetheart?" Aurelia asks, stalling.

"Yes!" Sylvia says, impatient. "Tell me what's wrong with you! Is everyone all right? Your cable said it was urgent. What's happened?"

"Oh, darling," Aurelia answers, hesitant, her subterfuge bobbing to the surface. "I was just getting worried. I thought you would call me right away when you got to London."

"Mother, I don't have a phone," Sylvia answers, vexation countermanded by relief. The schoolchildren's shouts rise and fall at random, raucous and piercing. "It's almost impossible to call within this district, let alone to the States. But I wrote to you right away, all the details. You'll see. You should have my letter any day." Six hundred times! Six hundred times she's written to her mother since she left for Smith at seventeen, flooding the envelopes with reassurance, gratitude, filial praise, innumerable dazzling inventories of accomplishments for Aurelia's delectation, the convenient distance of letters keeping their intrusive bond remote, but advantageously--for both of them--intact.

"Well, I was frightened," Aurelia hedges. "There was such a whirlpool of events and decisions to be made, and I hadn't heard. . ."

"Mummy, thank you for being so worried," Sylvia soothes, momentarily unguarded, attracted into the open by the tantalizing lure of maternal sympathy. "But really, we'll be fine. The flat is lovely; the children are happy. I'm relieved to be back in London". . .

Fictional Aurelia then nags Sylvia to bring the children to America for Christmas and offers to "take early retirement" (in real life, nine years early from her tenured-professor job) to serve as Sylvia's mother's helper while Sylvia gets a job teaching.

If you cringed as you read the above, rejoice that Plath studies has evolved.

I preserved that fictional passage to study how in the absence of facts Aurelia was depicted for the public as weak yet domineering, with nothing to do but pursue and harry Sylvia as if she were prey. This fictional Aurelia does only wrong: stalling, hedging, lying, posing, worrying, blandishing, intruding. Selfishly she'd forced poor Sylvia to excel at school and feed 600 happy letters into her motherly maw. Now Aurelia has fooled Sylvia into phoning her. This Aurelia is too lame-brained to have discerned in Sylvia's breathless letters about her busy, spendy new life the manic phase of her daughter's cyclic emotional extremes.

This portrayal also infantilizes the fictional Sylvia, at age 30 still a sucker for her mother's subterfuge. In real life Sylvia at 30 was as yet dependent on her mother's money, gifts, surety, and stateside support.

Aurelia Versus Olwyn, Round 1

Stafford Hotel, London, where Aurelia Plath and Olwyn had a talk.

Aurelia Plath for several reasons did not warm to Olwyn Hughes, who jealous of her brother Ted had treated his wife Sylvia Plath as a usurper and snob. Sylvia wrote Aurelia all about it. After Sylvia's death in February 1963, Ted Hughes appointed a series of caretakers for his children, none long-term until he appointed Olwyn.

In summer 1964 Aurelia visited England for three weeks. She had an eye and ear for all things suboptimal, especially in regard to her grandchildren, Frieda and Nick, extra precious because her Sylvia had borne them. The children were then ages four and two.

In the journals of her visits Aurelia noted, discreetly, in shorthand, what Olwyn was doing wrong.

1964, June: Got Frieda ready for school. Ted left in car. Took Nicky to playing field. [In shorthand:] Olwyn stayed in bed.

1964, June: (After giving Frieda a bath) [In shorthand:] When will she have her next one? Nick filled his pants twice today and made Olwyn mad but she does nothing to train him! 

1964, July: (Four-year-old Frieda touches her own nipples and says) [In shorthand:] "Someday these will stick out way out here!" (This makes me anxious. What has she been hearing.) She said, 'Olwyn can go into Daddy's room without knocking.'"

1964, July: "Breakfast at Stafford Hotel. The audacity of some of Olwyn's statements the first time we were alone. 'Ted just [shorthand] wanted his freedom. He did not want a divorce!' 'I have thought during that time Sylvia reached the height of her writing powers, wasn't it? You have much to be proud of.'"

The following year's visit:

1965, June: "The return to Court Green [shorthand:] & the disorder there was hard for me emotionally. The children are given sweets all the time and don't eat dinner properly. Frieda has two completely decayed back teeth! They brush their own teeth when they feel like it and when I came there was no toothpaste in the house."

Suboptimal.

What Olwyn's thoughts were I as yet do not know. Aurelia's journals do say Olwyn was a good cook. Aurelia did not see the children during 1966.