892 Shirley Street, Winthrop, Mass. USA, photographed in 2018. |
New facts about Sylvia Plath's background and her mother Aurelia. By Catherine Rankovic
Aurelia Plath Biography
Tuesday, June 11, 2019
Inside "Ocean 1212-W"
Thursday, May 9, 2019
Aurelia Plath's First Love
". . .[w]orking at the close of my junior year (1927) for a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had a handwritten manuscript in German dealing with new principles of soil mechanics. As he had a publication deadline to meet, I usually worked into the early evening, so we often had dinner together before I left Boston for home. It was during these meals that I listened, fascinated, to his accounts of travel and colorful adventures, fully realizing that I was in the presence of a true genius in both the arts and sciences. I came away with my notebook filled with reading lists. . ." (6)
She wrote that this self-education would one day benefit her children, but that is not the whole story. The friendship ripened into love.
For two years they enjoyed the theater, museums, hikes, camping, gardens, evenings with Karl's faculty friends, dining and dancing, and conversation most of all. The above photo was taken in 1926, when Karl, 43 and divorced, Boston's most eligible bachelor, chose Aurelia Schober, 20, moved by her innocence, intelligence, and sensitivity. He took her to her junior prom at the Kenmore Hotel on May 13, 1927 and then at 4:00 a.m. in Winthrop ate the post-prom breakfast Aurelia's mother had left prepared for them with instructions, Austrian style. Terzaghi wrote about it in his diary. His 82 volumes of diaries are in Oslo. I learned where his diaries were by reading his biography. ("Aurelia's boyfriend has a biography?")
Terzaghi centennial stamp, Austria, 1983 |
Shorthand transcription unlocked and confirmed his identity; he's the "Karl" in young Aurelia's lovelorn Gregg shorthand annotations in her copy of poet Sara Teasdale's Dark of the Moon. That book is in Sylvia Plath's personal library at the Lilly Library in Bloomington. Find the transcriptions here.
In 1928 Terzaghi left the U.S. for a prestigious engineering professorship in Vienna. Ten years later when the Nazis expelled his Jewish students and pressured him to work on the German Autobahn he returned to Boston, taught at Harvard and consulted worldwide. His legacy includes the Chicago subway system and the Aswan Dam, plus immortal equations and elegant problem-solving designs. In 1975 Bostonians in certain circles, or engineers, or Aurelia's college friends, could have guessed whom Aurelia was describing in Letters Home -- it's obvious, now that we know.
Their story is heartbreaking. For more of it, click here. Sylvia, taking her cue from her mother, married her own foreign-born male genius, Ted Hughes.
References: Karl Terzaghi: The Engineer as Artist (Goodman, 1998); Letters Home 1950-1963 (Plath, 1975); Norwegian Geotechnical Institute Terzaghi Library; Geoengineer.org; Wikipedia: Karl von Terzaghi (mentions Aurelia Schober, future mother of Sylvia Plath); Wikipedia: Ruth Terzaghi; Geotechnical Hall of Fame; American Society of Civil Engineers
Sunday, July 7, 2013
The "Manipulatively Controlling Mother"
A respected critic calls
Aurelia Plath “a manipulatively controlling mother” without stating any facts to back that up. [1] That Sylvia Plath had good reasons to hate her mother is something fans seem to “know” and accept without question. Here are their primary proofs that Sylvia hated her mother: one searing journal entry dated 12 December 1958; the assertion that priggish Mrs. Greenwood in the novel The Bell Jar is exactly what Aurelia was like; and the poem “Medusa” (originally titled “Mum”) that portrays Mum as a monster.
It turns out, however, that Sylvia in 1953, after her suicide attempt, spent her first month in the mental hospital telling her psychiatrist she loved her mother, and had to be talked into hating her. This is what the psychiatrist said in papers in a new Sylvia Plath archive opened to the public in January 2020. See what those papers say here.
Almost all of what biographers and critics write about Aurelia Plath is negative, as if facts were few and scanty. They aren't. They have simply been ignored. Please see this short video introducing some facts about Aurelia Plath's life: her college years, her job, how if Aurelia wasn't an easy mother to have, Sylvia was not an easy daughter to have.
We underestimate Sylvia if we think she was easy to manipulate and control!
[1] David Trinidad, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” Plath Profiles, Vol. 3 (2010) Supplement: Autumn 2010, p. 126.
See also "How Did Aurelia Plath Manipulate and Control Sylvia Plath?" blog post 11 July 2023.