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"] 

Poems About Aurelia Plath

Perseus isn't finished with Medusa until he turns his mother's suitor into stone.

"Sappho" by Beth Hinchliffe. America magazine, 29 June 2023. This poem was a runner-up in the Jesuit magazine's annual poetry contest. Aurelia Plath's friend and neighbor, journalist and author of an unpublished Plath biography, Hinchliffe said this was the first poem she ever wrote.

"Cottage Street, 1953" by Richard Wilbur, first published in 1972, describes Aurelia and a very depressed Sylvia having tea at his mother-in-law Edna Ward's house on Cottage Street in Wellesley. Mrs. Ward was Aurelia's friend. Hear Wilbur read the poem (and defend it).

"Aurelia Plath Confesses" by Lisa Mullenneaux, published in Prairie Schooner, Vol. 93, No. 2, Summer 2019. Mullenneaux is a poet, scholar, translator, and professor of writing, best known for the essay "Can You Call Her Sister? Amelia Rosselli on Sylvia Plath."

"Medusa" by Sylvia Plath (1962).

Frieda Hughes wrote several poems about her grandmother Aurelia. You've probably read some. Here are quotations from four different poems:

1. "Mirror, mirror on the wall / Who is the least dead / Of us all?// You loved me not, just saw / A copy of the face / You gave birth to."

2. "Come live with me!" it cried, / Nostrils spread above like nose wings / As if the face would take off from its neck-end / Like a ghastly bald crow."

3. "Chipping away at her / As if she were an egg, / to be broken and beaten / And turned into something else."

4.  "She is the gypsy / Whose young have rooted / In the very flesh of her scalp. // Her eyes are drill-holes where / Your senses spin, and you are stone / Even as you stand before her."

I think you get the gist.

Although Ted Hughes wrote at least one poem centered on Aurelia, Birthday Letters offers only glimpses. His poem "Night-Ride on Ariel" makes a typically chilling reference: "Mother / Making you dance with her magnetic eye / On your Daddy's coffin"