Feel Like a Longer Read?

I spent the past week writing a long post about Sylvia Plath, her mother Aurelia, and her psychiatrist Dr. Ruth Beuscher, three women intertwined and caught in the "I hate my mother" trap: https://theyalediaries.substack.com/p/i-hate-you-mother. You might like it. I'm training myself for the marathon task of finishing a book-length work.

Sylvia's Psychiatrist, Dr. Ruth Beuscher, in the News

More people read The Bell Jar than Plath biographies, and for them Esther Greenwood’s psychiatrist, the good “Dr. Nolan,” arrived in summer 1953 out of nowhere and fades out at the end. Biographies say Sylvia Plath and Dr. Ruth Beuscher met again in 1954 and 1958-59, but that story usually ends with Sylvia’s death in 1963. Most research treats Sylvia Plath as an end in herself. On this site, there is a before and a beyond. The bulk of Sylvia’s career has been posthumous. She actually hoped for that. And a person who influenced Sylvia as Beuscher did ought not to vanish because a book cuts her off. So here’s “RB” as you haven’t seen her.

Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse, born in 1923, was the eldest child of a authoritarian Presbyterian fundamentalist preacher, her mother a missionary who died in her forties. Ruth and siblings had high IQs and were rigidly home-schooled to be prodigies and whiz-kids and recite whole chapters from the Bible. After her first year at Vassar, Ruth, 17, eloped to Santa Fe with a young Mr. Edmonds she met at a retreat. The New York Times announced the marriage because her father Rev. Donald Barnhouse was a radio star, his “Bible Study Hour” broadcast coast-to-coast. He died in 1960 and his tapes still have avid listeners. Rev. Billy Graham said, “He knew the Scriptures better than any man I ever knew.”

Ruth had two children with Edmonds and in 1947 divorced him in Reno, where the above photo was taken. She sold flowers at the courthouse for six weeks to make money. The Edmonds' divorce was again New York Times-worthy news. Photos of young Ruth are hard to find; the Wilmington, Delaware, newspaper ran the photo on top of this post, with its caption reproduced at right.

Ruth married med-school classmate Bill Beuscher in 1950, and as psychiatrist Dr. Ruth Beuscher, M.D., met Sylvia Plath at McLean Hospital. Beuscher was a working professional woman, brilliant, attractive, and married with children -- all that Sylvia hoped to be. Sylvia loved Dr. Beuscher, also known as “Dr. B,” a “permissive mother figure” and granter of wishes. Sylvia refused therapy with anyone else and in her final days in London requested a female psychiatrist she didn't live to meet. 

Earrings show the doctor's fashion flair.

A Boston Globe article, 15 December 1957, headlined “Child Psychiatrist Quits In Hospital Squabble,” says after Beuscher left McLean she was hired to head a children’s psychiatric clinic but resigned. Beuscher explained: “What I was trying to do was to bring the children's unit up to top efficiency even if it meant the shifting of some senior employees.” The senior employees were all men. They called it a personality clash. With the article is a photo of her, taken in profile.

Beuscher then set up her private practice, meeting Sylvia for regular therapy sessions in 1958-59. Sylvia suffered from writer’s block and concern about the man she’d married. The pair explored Sylvia’s family issues. Sylvia decided having a baby would solve her problems.

In England Sylvia’s marriage fell apart and Sylvia asked "Ruth" for therapy by mail. Ruth advised her to get a lawyer and not sleep with her cheating husband, or the court might think her unserious. Ted Hughes really ran with Ruth's instruction, “Keep him out of your bed.” He repeated that as if it was sick or sinister and as if he were entitled. It was good advice.

Sappho the Cat (1959-1975)

Aurelia Plath with Sappho, c. 1972

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in 1959 acquired a tiger kitten but could not keep it: That summer the couple traveled the U.S., spent autumn at a writers' retreat, and in December packed up and moved to England. Sylvia had named the cat, a female, Sappho, and on 21 January wrote Esther Baskin from Boston:

"Did Ted or I tell you we are owners of a kitling? Granddaughter on one side of a cat belonging to Thomas Mann . . . The minute she walked into our apartment she went straight for a book of poems lying flat on the lowest bookshelf and possessed it."

Guess who fostered Sappho while her owners traveled, and inherited Sappho when her owners left the country less than a year after adopting her.

Fortunately, Aurelia Plath liked pets. Otto Plath had not allowed any. Aurelia quoted eight-year-old Sylvia as saying, "I'm so glad Daddy died; now I can have a cat." The family adopted one, named it Mowgli, and Sylvia loved him and dressed him up in baby clothes. Mowgli went missing in 1945. There's a photo of Warren and Sylvia with Sylvia holding Mowgli's mother Mitzi.

In letters sent to Aurelia from London, Sylvia inquired often after Sappho, who grew into a "huge" adult and in 1960 gave birth to triplets. Sappho the cat was not a burden but a happy note and a comfort in Aurelia's life as it collapsed all around her. Neighbor and friend Beth Hinchliffe much later wrote a poem remembering Aurelia around 1971, suggesting that Sappho's imperturbable presence served as a kind of therapy:

And now there is only Sappho for Aurelia . . .

And through it all, through Aurelia's blinding fury,

the madness of anguish, the desperate scrabbling

to keep her memories untouched by ugliness,

Sappho sits. Kneads. Watches.

Among Aurelia's snapshots in the Plath Family Papers at the Beinecke Library was a dime-sized photo of Sappho's face, cut from another photo. The fragment was too small to photograph, but it looked like a duplicate or alternate of the one shown above: a memento only Aurelia could have gone to the trouble to make and put there. And now I have a good idea why Aurelia's American granddaughters sent her, in 1980, stationery printed with a cartoon of a large self-satisfied tiger cat.

Aurelia had to ask someone to care for Sappho while she took annual trips to England in the early 1960s. Most likely some neighbors did. On returning to Wellesley in 1964 (July 2): "My kitchen was a smelly mess; Sappho's liver dish never washed and putrid." On returning to Wellesley in 1965 (30 June) Aurelia wrote, "Sappho, glad to see me, but unforgiving; when I pick her up, stiffens spine!"

The above photo is dated 1972. On 19 August 1975, Aurelia had terminally ill Sappho, age 16, put to sleep and grieved her, but not because Sappho had been Sylvia's cat. "I have lost the one living creature to whom I was the most important living being." In 1981 Aurelia still missed her cat and lets us know what else in life she had lost and valued: "Oh, Sappho, if only you were  here to pet, to make happy, have you lick my hand, my cheek & stretch out before the fire in blissful contentment -- greet me when I return home. Something to love and be trusted and loved by!" 

It Is a Truth Universally Acknowledged

Aurelia Plath (nee Schober) as a senior in college wrote a paper for her "English Novel" course about Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Dated December 12, 1927, and graded B-plus/A, it is in the Plath Family Papers at Beinecke Library at Yale, along with Aurelia's copy of the book.

Aurelia later noted in blue ink on its title page:

Reviewed in 1983. I'd use another term for the word "fools" today, otherwise a good paper. 

This is the only college paper of hers Aurelia preserved in her personal files. Carefully I unfolded and read it, keeping the pages open with weights as one does in rare book and manuscript rooms. On the first page her professor wrote a suggestion in red pencil. I tried to decipher it. Does it say "Figur?"

Rather than ask you to read the photo, I transcribed the page's text, below: 

[Begin]

"She (Jane Austen) had the fatal gift of observation, which is possibly the rarest gift of all, and where once a foible showed under her eye, she could not help noting it to her reader: it did not matter that she love [sic] and honored the character where she found it."  -William Dean Howells

With keen perception and unerring accuracy the realist, Jane Austen, depicted characters that moved upon the little provincial stage where she lived her own part. It was a narrow stage, whereon the chief business of its people "was attention to social duties: and their chief interest was matrimony."*

With a masterly hand Miss Austen selected a motley group of fools. Two individuals of her selection were endowed with superior mentalities, were destined to irresistibly attract each other; therefore to render the play more fascinating, Jane Austen imbued them with pride and prejudice: then, with an ironic smile partially withdrew and watched them act their parts. While she never actually stepped forward upon her stage to comment upon a player's art, yet the reader is conscious that she was standing in the wings, ironically smiling at blunders, silently applauding the rapier-like thrusts of her favorite's clever tongue, and nodding approval as good, cynical . . . .

 *Moody and Lovett

I'd have graded this paper a B-minus or a C because it draws solely on ideas presented in the book's introduction by novelist William Dean Howells. Nothing in the paper sounds original. We know from her master's thesis and her college diary that Aurelia could write much better than she did here. In Aurelia's copy of the book, only the introduction has underlinings, made with a fountain pen.

One would say that like most college students Aurelia was probably in a rush and tasked over the weekend with writing papers for her other courses. So she got the novel, read its introduction, and bingo. The sly little minx. Research, as usual, fleshes out the story:

In October Aurelia slipped and fell down the staircase in her dormitory, breaking her ankle, and was taken to Boston's Homeopathic Hospital. We know which hospital because her boyfriend Karl Terzaghi's diary says he sat at her bedside and held her hand. Karl's later diary entry of December 4, 1927, says Aurelia "still needs her crutches." The top student in her class of 1928, candidate for valedictorian, Aurelia had lost at least a week or two of coursework in six courses, and missed lectures and discussion. She was also in pain and hobbling around. Grade-wise, it could have cost her unless she caught up.

The day after her date with Karl, Aurelia bought, signed, and dated her copy of the novel: December 5, 1927, a Monday. She turned in her Austen paper the following Monday.

So like some college students (but never you or I) Aurelia took the easy way out by reading the introduction and padding out her assignment, maybe paging through the novel or reading its final page, as do some students (never you or I) who say they had no time to read the book or write the assignment because they had been away at their grandmother's funeral.

But Aurelia fell down the stairs into the dormitory's lobby, landing among students and staff, and when she walked with crutches everyone including her professors knew why. 

As her prof, I would have raised the grade on this paper from C or B-minus to "B," because things happen. Aurelia was a little bit special and showed some grit. Her real professor either showed a higher order of charity or was up late with a red pencil reading 40 or 60 other papers.

I Get Invited to an Academic Conference

My first glimpse of Beinecke Library

 

Me to My Sister: I was invited to give a paper at an academic conference in [expensive city].  I’ve never been there and I have a really good friend there

 

Sister: Sounds nice

 

Me: I’m not sure I can swing it financially

 

Sister: How much are they paying you

 

Me: I don’t get paid. It’s a career thing

 

Sister: If they invited you, they should pay you

 

Me: It doesn’t work that way. I pay them

 

Sister: You do?

 

Me: There’s a $350 registration fee and that gets me a group discount at a hotel but hotels are like $250 a night there, and I’d have to stay two nights at least and maybe three because my friend wants to show me around the city. I’ve always wanted to go there

 

Sister: Can’t you stay with your friend

 

Me: She has a roommate who sleeps on the couch. Rents are so expensive there

 

Sister: Well at least they pay for your plane ticket?

 

Me: No, they don’t do that

 

Sister: Then why would you go

 

Me: It’s kind of an honor to be invited, they’re really interested my research and I’d meet other scholars who do similar topics and hear what they’re researching, and maybe get my name out there and make some friends who work at universities who might tell other professors in the field what I’m doing or at least that work is being done. That’s the value of it. Plus I could put it on my resume. I figure it will cost about $2000 with food and rides to and from the airport

 

Sister: They don’t even feed you

 

Me: We get one lunch

 

Sister: 

 

Me: Guess I shouldn’t go, should save the money to do research at Yale

The Most Popular Plath Posts of 2025

Aurelia Plath in this note is outraged that the Smith College infirmary in 1951 gave Sylvia Plath sleeping pills (the two words Aurelia wrote in Gregg shorthand).

Of 2025's total of 44 AureliaPlath.info posts most readers favored the posts I favored, of primary materials and new connections made. I thought I was weird to be obsessed for a week with Sylvia Plath's hairbands and hair ribbons but wrote about them anyway and readers were interested! Sylvia's many mentions of sleeping pills and "phenobarbs," drugs she used to try to kill herself, I had never seen listed or tracked, so I did that. I am glad that readers saw value in that post and hope some might consider further research into Sylvia Plath and drugs.

Having forced myself to read the three books about Assia Wevill now in print (all by U.S. scholar Dr. Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, whom I met in December) I linked Aurelia with Assia for the very first time. They met at Court Green in 1967, really liked each other, and exchanged several letters.

This year's big Plath news was the Plath Family Papers opening for research at Yale University's Beinecke Library. The day before the archive officially opened I was there and also for the next entire workweek, mostly reading Aurelia's diaries, begun with hope in 1924 and ending in 1990. And the Plath and Greenwood heirloom family photographs, stunning and unique, open a casement window into Sylvia's paternal and maternal ancestry and give faces to names.

My fiercest thanks to readers who donated funds for transportation to, from, and within the city of New Haven, Connecticut.

I'm honored that you follow AureliaPlath.info. Despite the many advantages of blogspot.com I became aware this year that it's viewed as a hobbyist's platform, and passion for Plath is too important to keep siloed. So in 2026 I plan to join the bigger league of Substack. Most articles there are free to read. I will keep you informed.

Readers' favorites in 2025:

"I Am the Jew" (January)

"Sylvia Plath and Sleeping Pills" (January) 

"Sylvia Plath and Phyllis McGinley" (March)

"Sylvia Plath's Hair Ribbons and Hairbands" (June)  

"Pleased With Everything: The Plath Family Papers at Yale" (July) 

"Sylvia Died Yesterday" (August) 

"Aurelia Plath and Assia Wevill: Tight Wires Between Them" (October) 

Images from the Plath Family Papers

Aurelia Plath's last diary. These pages from 1989 show variations in Aurelia's handwriting as she struggled with macular degeneration. Emotionally she has just been knocked sidewise after reading the new Plath biography Bitter Fame. 

On the leftward page she noted "Nov. 10 The OPENING OF THE WALL Between East and West Germany! Is light coming to this part of the world as I continually lose my sight?" Just above that, a late-in-life realization: "I should have worked for my own 'career.' Regret so not accepting the 'Dean of Women' post at Northeastern. Bleeding ulcers were still with me then." Young Sylvia had also guilt-tripped Aurelia about taking that job, saying, "For your own self-aggrandizement you would leave us complete orphans!" On the rightward page, on November 12 "(Full Moon!)" Aurelia and her neighbor, financial professional Bill Cruickshank, worked on her accounts until 5:30 p.m. "Think Positive!" she told herself, and under November 17 wrote a catty little note about "uneducated" Dido Merwin, whose searing short memoir about Sylvia is appended to Bitter Fame.

The baby is Aurelia's sister Dorothy, born in May 1911. Aurelia is on the right. They are with their mother Aurelia Greenwood Schober. If the photo is from 1911, Aurelia was five and her mother 23.

The label on this palm-sized diary says "1962 - Catastrophe at Court Green." During the week Ted and Sylvia's marriage fell apart their houseguest Aurelia kept quiet, tended her grandchildren, and wrote in this diary very little of consequence. On July 11 Sylvia shut herself away to write a novel and Aurelia served her dinner in the study. No further details. You'd never know except by reading a later diary that during that week Sylvia angrily told Aurelia, "You are of no use to me here!" and ordered her to move out. The only trace of that in the 1962 diary is a page with names and phone numbers of nearby hotels. It was midsummer and hotels were all booked. Housed with midwife Winifred Davies, Aurelia passed the time reading a book of home remedies, copying out numerous uses of cider vinegar. (I'm not making that up.) Invited back to Court Green a few days later, Aurelia recorded in Gregg shorthand that Sylvia, unable to sleep, eat, or care for her children was sedated by the local doctor. 

The above is the older of two diaries Aurelia definitively censored, this one by ripping out pages and noting, "Tore out all the sad notes made from 1936-40." Wish she hadn't. The other injured diary has several pages from autumn 1958 razored out. Letters from Sylvia hint that was a period of conflict having nothing to do with Sylvia: Aurelia was fighting with her siblings.

A frank and lengthy discussion about reading Aurelia Plath's diaries is free at Substack.

I Hoped This Was Aurelia Plath's Poem

Before she married Otto Plath, Aurelia Schober wrote poetry and fiction. Two published poems survive: one from her high-school days and one from college. This poem was in the folder with her first diary, 1924-28, in the Plath Family Papers at Yale University.

I'd gone to see those papers hoping to find Aurelia kept notebooks full of her poems. We could compare with Edna St. Vincent Millay's or Sara Teasdale's -- the top female poets of the time, and Aurelia owned their books. And maybe consider how Aurelia's poems might relate to her daughter Sylvia's poems. Oh, I hoped this poem was Aurelia's, until I read it.

I thought if Aurelia preserved this poem it was hers, but "A.C.M." is credited and her initials then were "A.F.S." Today most poets want credit for their poems but for some reason A.C.M. lay low. Maybe the reason was modesty. Aurelia attended a women's college and its yearbooks 1926 through 1928 each devote pages to creative writings, all unsigned. Much later, Aurelia identified her own poem "A Child's Wish" in the 1928 yearbook [1], but the typeface here matches that of Winthrop High School's yearbook and Aurelia graduated from there in '24. 

This rough-hewn poem lacks the formal polish of Aurelia's "Forbidden Fruit" (1923; she was seventeen), which she had credited to her and it is reproduced here. Call it "banal" but I like it and it's better than "Bits of Gold." The issue then is why Aurelia kept this clipping. Possibly it was a student's very early work, like, "Ode on an Ag'd Vase."

Aurelia had no classmates with the initials A.C.M. Whoever the author was I hope that like Sylvia they kept writing poems until they got the knack.

[1] Aurelia photocopied "A Child's Wish" for researcher Harriet Rosenstein c. 1970 but it seems Rosenstein did not receive it and it is with other materials in Aurelia Plath's papers at Smith College Libraries.

I Was Playing Paper Dolls

Aurelia in Sarasota, Florida, Easter 1967

Early in the Plath Family Papers research I saw I’d been working with paper dolls and of course I had, because between Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Aurelia Plath and I there had never been anything but paper. 

Although they had been real living people, what I’d read determined the faces I gave them and how I clothed them. Gwyneth Paltrow in the movie Sylvia wore upper-middle-class clothes, as if the costumers never met anyone like Sylvia Plath who bought off the rack aspirational clothes not quite so expensive or  flattering. And a whole generation now thinks Sylvia had blue eyes when they were plain common brown. 

That only proved that Sylvia imagined is not a person with an eye color. She is a cutout to be costumed: The Marilyn Monroe of literature, if you like. A feminist. A mystic. Political. Suicidal Esther Greenwood. Clothe her however you want. And instead of outgrowing our Sylvia Plath paper doll we got farther and farther away from the doll and deeper into the paper. Thinking Sylvia is her paper we generate more paper arguing whether paper equals truth. Any eight-year-old can tell you that’s a misapprehension.

In the new Plath Family archives I’m at my keyboard as at a sewing machine upstyling some old togs papered onto Sylvia, Ted, and Otto -- they're all in the archive -- and trying to craft for Aurelia a face and presence I am now privileged to see. Reading Aurelia's diaries and the lists of hundreds of friends in her bursting address book and seeing notes and inks and photos she cherished I felt as if her live warm body was stirring and arose as after a long sleep. She is more alive, more colorful and collected, more Queen Elizabeth II, than the Aurelia on whose life I thought myself an expert.

December 9, 1959

A reminder that today is the anniversary of Ted and Sylvia Plath Hughes's departure from the U.S. to England on the U.S.S. United States. The above was a sticker or tag for outbound boxes or luggage. Aurelia Plath kept this particular tag and it's in the Plath Family Papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, opened for research this past December 3.

Aurelia liked to annotate. Sometimes her annotations are helpful or revealing, but this "Dec 1959" annotation up top puts me in mind of a brain floating around without a brain stem. Or a little cloud on a blue horizon. But who knows she felt remembering her daughter, alive and adventurous?

Sylvia was optimistic although the move was risky, especially for her, because she was leaving her network/safety net of friends, relatives, well-wishers, the psychiatrist she trusted, and her native country: almost everything. Yet on that December 9 she was looking forward, not back. In her journal she'd written, "I really want this." [1]

[1] Journals, 20 January 1959.

A Place for Mom

Sylvia Plath's paternal grandmother (1852-1919)

I think now that this photo is exactly what it looks like: Somebody hit the old lady. This is Otto Plath's mother, Sylvia Plath's paternal grandmother Ernestine Kottke Plath, photo taken in 1916 in Oregon State Hospital (formerly "Hospital for the Insane") at Salem.

I'd learned that its new patients lined up every few weeks for a traveling photographer. If the photo was not taken the day of admission, I thought it fair to imagine Ernestine had walked into a doorframe or something, but context changed my mind, especially:

What are the odds that among three known photos of Sylvia's grandmother, one shows her with a black eye? Not makeup or a trick of the light. And likely it wasn't the first she'd ever had.

A immigrant from Prussia and mother of six, Ernestine first broke down in 1905 while living in North Dakota with husband Theodor and their five younger children. Depressed, anxious, and feeling persecuted, Ernestine walked the floor all night with a leg ulcer that only hurt more when she lay down. Her frightened family had her judged insane and sent to the state mental hospital at Jamestown. When Theodor signed her out in 1910 Ernestine didn't want to leave. Theodor had been chasing opportunity in Harney, Oregon, where he'd failed at homesteading and was back to working as a blacksmith. Yet machines had evolved from iron to steel, and horsepower to steam, and in 1911 Theodor was 60, late in life for a master blacksmith to learn another trade.

The couple's eldest son Otto told his wife Aurelia he had been raised without love, and in particular he "constantly voiced his recollections of his mother's type of child care," I guess trying aloud to process trauma forty years past. Family lore says that Ernestine communicated "absolutely nothing to her children for the last thirty years of her life." If literally true, Ernestine went silent in Prussia in 1889 when Otto was four and her two youngest not yet born. If not literally true, we get the idea that six children were too many for her.

In 1911 Theodor, Ernestine, and grown sons Paul and Max left arid eastern Oregon and shared a small house in Oregon City where Max, the only able-bodied one, found work with a lumber company. Theodor and Paul looked for jobs and came home to their sick wife and bad mother now aging and complaining of overwork. Maybe to reduce the tension, the family between 1912 and 1915 tried to place Paul, always sickly, with Otto and his wife in San Francisco. Otto and his wife said no. By 1916 Paul and Max couldn't tolerate their mother and Max wanted to move out and get married. There followed a turbulent scene that ended with Ernestine at the mental hospital begging the staff to please take her in, not to send her back home.

Her diagnosis was dementia. A physician making rounds a year later called Ernestine a harmless old lady. Her nurse noted that Ernestine knew enough to use the toilet. If she'd been battered at home -- we call it elder abuse -- the institution might have been preferable. Tuberculosis killed her in 1919 and her ashes sat in the hospital's basement for a hundred years, her tin among hundreds unclaimed and forgotten. 

Theodor might seem like the family's rock and good guy but he was no prize parent either. If his father Johann and son Otto are indicators, Theodor with family was rigid and punitive, the type Sylvia memorialized in her poem "Daddy." To spite his grown children Theodor willed the first five of them a dollar and left the youngest 120 acres in Washington State. Theodor died in Oregon City, alone; a neighbor found his body. He was buried in a pauper's field with no marker.

After Otto Plath died, his long-suffering widow Aurelia went on living as if he had never existed; as Sylvia said, "buried him in her heart." Sylvia hated this and got revenge on her mother in print. Sylvia herself became an abused wife. This was part of a larger pattern of generational and spousal abuse and resentment that can sink not only marriages but children and families.

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.

Why I Love Hearing From You

Sylvia's paternal relatives lived in Fall Creek, WI. Today's population 1,500.

I am always delighted when readers respond to these posts, and today Dr. Bob Drehmel, retired family physician, shares childhood memories of "the Bartz girls" -- sisters including Otto Plath's first wife Lydia Bartz Plath -- his neighbors in Fall Creek, Wisconsin. Around 1910 their brother Rupert Bartz introduced classmate Otto Plath to the "very pretty" Lydia, as shown in a photo taken that year at the Mercantile local general store. She worked there, lived at home and saved her money. And would lose it. In 1912 Lydia married Otto and became a Plath. 

Dr. Drehmel's memories come from the late 1950s-early '60s when the "Bartz girls" were retirement age.

 

"I found the name of Otto Plath. I then realized his first wife was Lydia Plath, who lived 3 houses down from our house. I have two brothers and one sister [born 1948-1957] and we would frequently see Lydia and her two sisters Odelia and Caroline. . . . known as the 'Bartz girls.' We would often walk down to their house as they seemed to like small children. Only Lydia had married, and she had no children, so I think we were their 'surrogate' kids. They would fuss over us, invited us in for a chat, and ALWAYS had a candy jar available. I think it was a 'win-win' proposition. They enjoyed our company, and we loved the candy. . . 

"Caroline was the most outgoing and did most of the talking. I remember Lydia had a vocal tremor with lower-pitched speech. They had shelves of knickknacks on the walls. When outside, they were frequently seen wearing wide-brimmed straw hats and tending to a flower garden. They were pretty much homebodies and I don't remember seeing much of them around town.

"That Mercantile store was still there when we were growing up. The Zetzman family was still running it. I used to play on some silver bars that were out front . . . my father said they were there to tie the horses up . . . I think the candy was 'rock' candy, often what is called 'ribbon' candy. 

"When the [Bartz girls]  had to leave the house they drove together and always had umbrellas, rain or shine, I guess to block either the rain or the sun. My sister remembered them wearing long black stockings (not 'nylons') and black shoes with low heels. They drove a big blue sedan."

 

Lydia in the Plath story had been known only as the "sexually cold" (so said Otto) and embittered first wife who lost her and her sisters' money to Otto's bad investments. Otto called Lydia "uneducated," but she soon claimed an education, attending nursing school alongside of Otto's sister Frieda Plath. Thank you, Dr. Drehmel, for adding nuance to the picture. Lydia found success and happiness and I hope you do too. Here's my outline of Lydia's nursing career. And also see a portrait of Lydia and her mother and sisters taken in July 1912 just before Lydia left Fall Creek to marry Otto.

Fall Creek High School with Bartz girls Odelia (3rd from left) and Caroline (far right), 1910. Before then Fall Creek had no high school so Lydia Bartz didn't go. She later earned college credits to qualify for nursing school.

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. On behalf of 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. Envious. 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"