Book Review: Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume I, by Carl Rollyson

Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume I (1932-1955), by Carl Rollyson, University of Mississippi Press (2023), 400 pp., $24.14 at Amazon.com.

If you want Sylvia Plath without poetry, dip into this timeline of gleanings from diaries, letters, personal calendars, and other Plath biographies and sources, spanning her life from birth to September 1955. Biographer Carl Rollyson has published 40-plus books including two Plath biographies which elided Plath's early years. Currently he is completing a biography about Plath's early years. Sylvia Plath Day by Day Vol. 1 assembles his source facts, quoting the published and unpublished. According to Rollyson this chronicle restores "precious details" and the objectivity lost when biographers shape facts into narratives. His introduction says:

In effect, you are presented with the raw data, without commentary, so that you become the biographer.

Rollyson edited this raw data, so it is not raw data. The introduction explains:

The entries in this book are shorter than the sources they are taken from. My principle of selection has been to record the most striking events and comments that reveal Plath but also to minimize repetition, except when repetition . . . seems important . . .

Examples (I'm choosing interesting ones):

1946

October 14: Writes up the program of a school assembly, featuring a reading, a piano solo, choral singing and reading, a harmonica solo, a skit, a vocal trio, tap dance, and an accordion solo.

October 15: A sixteen-line poem for Miss Cox, which ends "But behind the cold, white stillness / There's the promise of a spring."

October 16: Clippings about World Series games, visual-aid education, physical exams.

October 17: "World news is really discouraging--wish I could run things for a while."

October 18: Orchestra rehearsal, pleased to realize she has left her ancient history book at home, "Oh! Well! I'll get along."

October 19: Wears a yellow evening gown with black velvet bows to a dance. One boy steps on her toes, but she has fun dancing with another partner who is "very nice" [drawing of a heart].

October 20: "All the girls were talking about last night happenings and were comparing partners."

October 21: "Dear Diary, I don't know what possesses me to mess you up by such scribbling. Some old nagging things inside me prompts me to waste such nice paper. . . . From now on I won't let the weak side of my character hold sway."

1953

April 28, 9:30 a.m.: "Hair."

10:00 a.m.- 12:30 p.m.: News office.

2:00-6:00 p.m., 7:00-10:00 p.m.: "STUDY MILTON."

April 29, 8:30 a.m.: Chapel.

9:00-10:00 a.m.: In News Office.

10:00 a.m.- 12:30 p.m.: Studies Milton.

2:00 p.m.: "Davis paper due."

3:00 p.m.: "Milton Exam."

6:00 p.m.: Press board banquet, Auden in attendance.

April 30, 8:00 a.m.: "Activities board."

9:00 a.m.: Audits science class.

10:00 a.m.: Bells.

Hampshire Book Shop.

2:00 p.m.: Class with Professor Davis.

3:00 p.m.: Milton class.

4:00-6:00 p.m.: Sally.

"Phi Beta Banquet."

Day by Day is the first Plath bio to poach lots of direct quotations from Plath's childhood diaries, so I focused there. Those diaries remain unpublished because they are boring. From art teachers to camp counselors, every authority every hour dangled rewards and awards for doing as they asked. Plath responded like a trained seal. The flip side was that she grew up firmly disciplined and knowing her own value. She could control the situation when "parking" with dates. Plath fighting off a rapist (December 3, 1950) Day by Day however renders as "She strongly rejects the idea."

I did like Day by Day's glimpses of Plath's grandfather, who gave her hugs, gifts of money, and violets for planting. Extremes of mood, symptoms of Plath's mental illness, emerged when she was 16 or 17.

It is a standard joke that writings about Plath must be faultless, so I will fine-tooth and fume over Day by Day's errors, and omissions not only of childhood events I think significant but those important enough for Dr. Heather Clark to flesh out in her definitive biography Red Comet. For example, Red Comet (p. 93) gives most of a paragraph to Sylvia's diary entry of July 25, 1947, a rare hateful one calling her mother a stinker and a "damn cuss'd old thing" for not buying her a dress she wanted. Sylvia then recanted her angry words. Rollyson's version reads:

July 25: "It's good to be able to spread out and stretch again, knowing that I have a new diary waiting." Buys "a dream of a dress" at Filene's "aquamarine with black bands around the neck, waist, the sleepers, and a narrow black-square outline all through the material."

Maybe these are not the same diaries?

Understanding that the text I read was in galleys, I think if Rollyson had taken a minute to check the first few pages of Plath's Letters Vol. 1 he'd know it's incorrect to say that "Plath's first extant letter to Aurelia Plath is a postcard dated July 14" [1944] (note 102, p. 329). It was Aurelia Plath, not Sylvia, who inscribed Sylvia's diary with "Not to be written in after 8 p.m." Visitors designated Uncle Henry and Aunt Elizabeth "Aldrich" -- the surname of Plath's neighbors -- were in fact Sylvia's blood relatives Henry and Elizabeth Schober (9, 31). And "Grampy" died in 1965, not 1963.

Now I feel better. (What made me feel better?)

The accuracy improves and, oddly, interest heightens as the timeline enters and atomizes familiar territory. I was grateful that author comments were few. When in May 1945 12-year-old Plath rescued and fed a baby bird, a comment says this prefigures the baby bird that Plath and her husband tried to save in 1958. This has nothing to do with her art and growth, and in this world of real fire and bombs through the roofs I felt it should be embarrassing to care.

And I wonder how every detail about Sylvia Plath's life has come to be so precious there's a market for barrel scrapings and granules ever smaller, as if by crafting lists and footnotes and smartmaps instead of prose we stay safe.

Top-Rated Plath Research Posts of 2023

Studious me with manual typewriter, junior year

Most Popular

Diary of an Aurelia Plath Researcher (May 16) Thank you for your interest in what I'd tell you privately.

Aurelia and Sylvia Plath Had Black Cousins (November 14) The most emotional, heart-pounding research I've ever done.

How Did Aurelia Plath Control and Manipulate Sylvia? (July 18) They sadly underestimated Sylvia.

Books About Sylvia Plath That I Hate to Love (July 11) This was fun to write.

Top Research Posts

Sylvia Plath's Hungarian Roots (September 26) Genealogy proves Sylvia Plath was not a Jew.

Aurelia and Sylvia Plath Had Black Cousins (November 14) An inconvenient truth.

Diary of an Aurelia Plath Researcher (May 16) First interview with one of Aurelia's former students.

Hype: The Sales Numbers of Ariel (February 7) Neglected business papers shatter a 50-year-old fantasy.

Personal Favorites

Aurelia Goes to a Poetry Reading (June 27) A Cape Cod archivist's help plus research revealed an Aurelia facet totally new.

Prussia: What Does It Mean? (September 19) I am proud of having condensed thick dusty histories of Prussia into an easy "Prussia for Plath fans" post.

There were 48 weekly posts in 2023, my tenth year of posting. It's having the effect I wanted. Thank you for being so interested in Sylvia Plath's world that you want to know more. There is more.

       -Your researcher,

          Catherine

Guest Post: One Sunday in 1973, by Evelyn C. White

Evelyn C. White is the author of Alice Walker: A Life (2004).

I met Sylvia Plath’s mother in the 1970s shortly after I’d begun college in a Boston-area suburb. Reportedly drawn to the enclave because of its excellent public schools, Aurelia Plath, a widow, had lived in the town since 1942. Then age 10 and already published, young Sylvia was soon lauded as one of the most gifted students in the community.

Encouraged by her mother, Sylvia joined a prison ministry during her teenage years. “She traveled into Boston with her Sunday school group to visit the Charles Street jail,” writes Andrew Wilson in Mad Girl’s Love Song (2013) which details Plath’s life before her ill-fated marriage to British poet Ted Hughes. There, Plath mingled with a “smattering of murderers, gunmen and thieves” during church service, Wilson notes.

As for me? Mindful of the many 1960s-70s era Black freedom fighters who’d been incarcerated (among them Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, and Assata Shakur), I’d entered college determined to become a prison warden.

Aurelia Plath signs a copy of Letters Home, 1976

In addition to my coursework, I longed for “hands-on” experience in the field of corrections and was thrilled to discover that a group of local women visited inmates at a nearby facility. I arranged to join them.

On a bright Sunday morning, I was picked up at my dorm. The driver introduced me to the other passengers whose names I barely registered but met with a nod. Settled into the backseat, I did note the lustrous crown of auburn hair on the woman next to me. It stood in stark contrast to her somber demeanor.

After clearing security at the prison we were escorted into a chapel for worship service. I don’t recall the sermon. But I’ll never forget the inmates who sat, stony-faced, on the opposite side of the sanctuary surrounded by armed guards. “This might not be a fun career,” I thought to myself.

After church, visitors were led to another room to “socialize” with the prisoners. Directed toward a ring of folding chairs, I took a seat. By chance, my backseat companion on the morning drive sat directly across from me.

Eyes trained on a stream of sunlight from a distant window, I listened as the inmates (still under armed guard) and guests introduced themselves. After a few people had spoken, the woman from the car said her name; one that hadn’t sunk in when I’d first met her: Aurelia Plath.

In the sliver of silence before the next voice, I locked eyes with the woman whose daughter, in the small hours of February 11, 1963, had gassed herself in a frigid, London flat. Aurelia Plath held my gaze until a mutual flash of recognition passed between us. She knew that I knew. And vice versa.

Astonished by the realization that I was in the presence of Sylvia Plath’s mother, I went blank. I couldn’t concentrate as I thought about the brilliant writer who’d chronicled her debilitating depression in The Bell Jar and later, in Ariel, the posthumous poetry collection (“The woman is perfected”) that secured her international acclaim.

Back then, I didn’t have the capacity to convey my condolences to Aurelia Plath nor to understand the impact of our encounter in that setting. But I was indelibly shaped by the experience which effectively ended my prison warden ambitions. In hindsight, I know I couldn’t handle all the sorrow that marked the day.

The Bell Jar Movie: Would You Sue Too?

Donna Mitchell and Marilyn Hassett in The Bell Jar (1979)

In some databases, Hollywood's The Bell Jar (1979), viewable on YouTube, is classed as a horror movie. I watched it for its portrayal of the heroine Esther's mother, "Mrs. Greenwood," based on Aurelia Plath. Tony-Award-winning and Oscar-nominated Julie Harris acted the thankless role of a ditz whose hobby is Tyrolean folk dancing. The actors are good but the script and direction, ruinous: When "Buddy Willard" drops his pants the room's electricity and lights happen to go out. Esther confidently tips a New York cab driver, and she is sexually aroused by the antics of Lenny and Doreen at Lenny's apartment. On her last night in her hotel room Esther strips to her knickers, bellowing while throwing her clothes out the window.

Critics hated it and star Marilyn Hassett's career never recovered: another Bell Jar casualty, one of many. Sylvia Plath knew the novel was toxic, and although she worked all her life for recognition did not want her name on it. It was the only such request she ever made and it was not honored. Ted Hughes sold the movie rights in the mid-1970s for $60,000 ($250,000 today) and had no part in the result except for starting it.

Donna Mitchell plays "Joan," Plath's fictional fusion of two real-life Smith College classmates. A bit player in the novel, "Joan" in the movie is Esther's best friend and smolders to seduce her. When Esther edges away from clingy Joan at the mental hospital and does not say, as in the novel, "You make me puke," Joan proposes a romantic double suicide. That's not in the book. Esther runs away and later finds Joan's body hanging in the woods. That's not in the book either. We get a horror-movie closeup of Joan's dead face.

Julie Harris as the tasteless and exasperated Mrs. Greenwood.

Jane Anderson in 1986 sued the screenwriter, director, Hughes and others for defamation, asking for $6 million and withdrawal of the film from circulation. In 1979 Anderson, Plath's classmate and fellow patient at McLean but never her good friend, saw the movie but said nothing. By 1986 it had aired as a made-for-TV movie and Plath's biographers had identified Anderson as one of the models for "Joan." The Harvard professor of psychiatry found she had a growing reputation as a suicidal lesbian (she was neither) when those were bad things to be. She said she couldn't teach and couldn't write.

My takeaway from watching was that Anderson, a private citizen, had good reason to sue the filmmakers who had exploited "her" character.

Anderson settled for having been "unintentionally defamed" and $150,000, enough to pay her lawyers. Since 2012, Bell Jar remakes have been announced but never made. It's now said it will be a TV series on Showtime, but no other news has emerged as of late 2023. Probably to the good.

Meditation on a Photo: Aurelia Plath's Ankles of Clay

Front row, third from left. Her Winthrop High graduating class had 146 students.

Aurelia Schober in this yearbook photo from 1924 -- she's a high-school senior, 18 -- differs from her classmates in height and build and is the worst-dressed of the lot, her faded cap-sleeved cotton dress, with a decorative bow and ribbon so it's not a housedress or what her mother called a "wash dress," a vivid contrast to her schoolmates' woolen sweaters and skirts. They're dressed for autumn or winter, yet wear pretty shoes while "Ri-Ri's" oxfords look too tight. Her ankles will always be a weak point, broken twice (when she was 10, and again at 21) then repeatedly twisted or injured. Ankles of clay. Or maybe ill-fitting shoes.

Readymade clothes didn't (and still don't) accommodate tall women, so Aurelia wore whatever fit. In this photo she looks like what she is: eldest daughter of immigrants with two younger siblings and a breadwinner father who in 1924 was literally walking Boston's streets seeking jobs, a former headwaiter reduced to taking intermittent or seasonal employment. He had already chosen for Aurelia a two-year business college that would train her to make her own money. Her parents would never recover from her father's underemployment and later depended on Aurelia for housing.

In the photo Aurelia stands tall, doesn't look unhappy or self-conscious or shunned. She was the First Rebuttal speaker on her women's debating team and a star at school -- always, always, a top honor student. Freshman year, the yearbook's "Who's Who" picked her out and said: "Aurelia Schober doesn't hesitate to swallow every morsel of knowledge to be found." Sophomore year, when they knew she could take a joke: "A. Schober doesn't swallow the books much. She has brains in her feet, even. Just think!" The 1924 Winthrop High School senior class "prediction" said:

". . . one of [a classmate's] planes [is] making its daily trip to Florida. Seated at the extreme left is George B., world-famed violinist. . . in the third seat is Cecelia D., a school teacher . . . The young aviatrix is Aurelia Schober, who, not able to get seated comfortably because of her height, stood during the entire trip. Aurelia is now President of Schober Soapy Soap Flakes, Inc."

The future Aurelia piloted the plane and CEO'd an industrial firm! Which female in your own graduating class compares? (On the yearbook staff, Aurelia might have written this "prediction" herself.) It seems that the Schober family was poor but clean, as the trope goes. Aurelia wore to school a shapeless over-washed unseasonable thing without publicly pouting because her parents, as immigrant parents do, scolded her to mind her schoolwork and be at the top of her class because they'd sacrificed their whole lives for her and she should be grateful for any shoes and clothes she got.

Aurelia had friends and always did. The local newspaper records that she attended a classmate's quite elegant tea party, but never that she gave one. For certain of my readers I must point out that in 1924 females holding hands or linking arms with besties was not gay.

Photos of Aurelia -- fairly rare -- show that except for the first years of her marriage to Otto Plath she wore unflattering or misfit clothing, often secondhand. That for years she wore a ratty coat "like some teachers you'll see," a witness has confirmed. In her late 60s Aurelia, retired from teaching, made some money from the work of her famously dead writer daughter and was photographed in suits that fit and pearl earrings, her incorrigibly wavy hair tamed with a permanent. The best she could do in high school was a hairband.

Aurelia Schober, later Plath, as her class salutatorian gave a speech about "Loyalty" (a mind-blowing document to be discussed in a future post). Unwillingly, and unprepared for it, "Ri-Ri" became the most famous alumna of them all.

["146 students," Winthrop Sun, 14 June 1924.]

Imagine If Sylvia Plath Had Lived

Carrot cake for Sylvia's birthday, Oct. 27. -Amin Safaripour, Unsplash

This week Sylvia Plath would have turned 91. Let's imagine that she didn't kill herself. What we might be hearing:

"Did you know Sylvia Plath was Ted Hughes's first wife? Divorced him, hung around London until she realized she'd never belong and needed a real job. Book reviews weren't paying and BBC had had enough of her since her only subject was herself. Her funny/bitter divorce novel Double Exposure sat unfinished because she couldn't find the right ending. Granted, she became a path-breaking poet despite Ariel being her personal domestic drama, throwing darts at Ted as if he cared one whit. The Bell Jar? British readers sighed: an overprivileged American, suicidal because she had too many choices.

With her children Plath moved back to the U.S. and as a female couldn't get credit or a credit card in her own name until 1974. For lack of child care, Plath declined to teach freshman English at Smith and by the time the kids were in boarding school no one at Smith had ever heard of her. Grants and prizes went to younger writers. Plath then opted to publish The Bell Jar in the U.S., alienating all her friends except Mr. Crockett, and her furious mother burned all her letters and childhood stuff. Plath worked as an instructor at Boston University and later, after the success of Three Women, had a full professorship in the English department at a vocational college.*

American Literature was a boys' club, alcoholic and handsy, and Anne Sexton with her Pulitzer held the top spot for women poets and said Plath had copied her. This inspired Plath to write the novel Gargoyles. In the middle 1970s, feminists discovered and reprinted Plath's poems "Daddy" and "The Jailor." Teased at school that "Daddy" was their daddy, the kids moved back overseas where their father had a new wife and children and was publishing book after book.

Healed by the antidepressant Prozac and inspired by a stay in Alaska with her son, Plath wrote the brilliant, bracing poems of Ocean 1212-W, a volume credited with seeding modern eco-poetry. At rendering a landscape or infusing a mere feather with moral dimension and meaning, Plath had no 20th-century peers. Plath let Ms. magazine publish her old radio play Three Women. A producer read it, asked for its theatrical rights -- and the adaptation was a hit!

Three Women was the first drama set in a maternity ward. Women could identify! With music, it was hailed as "For Colored Girls, but without the color." Its off-Broadway success funded the travel and studies that inspired the poems of Molten and Plume, the latter book short-listed for important awards. But Plath's essay trashing John Ashbery's work got her labeled "flaky" and "anile." Interviewers asked her only about Ted and whether she was writing a book about Ted. The published divorce novel seemed dated and unfunny. A family member in turn published a novel about a poet mother, titled Harpy.

Plath taught in an MFA program for 11 years, earning five-star ratings. Her collected environmental essays were published as The Raw Meat Motel. Nudged into retirement when a student found ethnic slurs in her early work, Plath reviewed her stacks of journals and manuscripts and copies of Mademoiselle and in an email wrote, It scarcely seems possible that we were all so obsessed with ourselves and with our little games of distinction! Plath recycled all that paper and moved house. Her mirror, she says, shows a committed artist who never misses a sunrise and hopes she lives to be older than Stanley Kunitz."

Not an easy life, but honorable and full! Better than most. Many happy returns!

*In 1985, women were only 17 percent of full-time U.S. faculty at the associate professor and professor levels.

Guest Posts Wanted

I am inviting guest posts about or related to Aurelia Plath and Sylvia, around 800 words or less. Negative or positive, all points of view should be evidence-based and not rants (Sylvia's rants about Aurelia are enough).

New-book excerpts, if about Aurelia or about Sylvia's family, are fine. Those with something new to say or show about Aurelia Plath's life or her context, or about mother and daughter, or with suggestions for future AureliaPlath.info posts, please email Microsoft Word documents to platheducational@gmail.com. Thank you!

What the Hell Is The Christian Science Monitor?

Ukrainian soldiers training to use a grenade launcher, Christian Science Monitor 10 May 2023. Photo and story by Scott Peterson

Sylvia Plath's first nationally published poem was “Bitter Strawberries” in The Christian Science Monitor. An international reader asked me what The Christian Science Monitor (CSM) was to Sylvia, a non-Christian, and what might be Christian about the paper, because looking at the content (a daily, now online only) it is not obvious.

Christian Science is a faith established in 1870s Boston. For ills of the body and soul, believers looked to the healing miracles of Jesus and prayed for healing instead of calling doctors. That made Christian Science somewhat infamous. Today's followers may see doctors if they want. They won't go to hell because the faith does not believe in hell. Christian Science peaked in the 1930s with a quarter-million members. Its best legacy is its newspaper, one of the few surviving national U.S. dailies, and not so much Christian as it is secular humanist.

We do not know what inspired the Plath household to subscribe to the Christian Science Monitor. Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar complained that the Monitor treated suicides and sex crimes and airplane crashes as if they didn't happen.

That is not true; it just didn't rub atrocities in your face. Below is part of the page "Bitter Strawberries" appeared on (11 August 1950). Readers got briefed on Korean War battle news, missing atomic-research papers, revolt in Jakarta, threats of a mass strike in Italy. And Australia, fearing Korean aggression, was re-arming but couldn't pay for it:

CSM's editorial board in 1953 favored executing the Rosenbergs because the justice system had operated as it should and found them guilty (20 June 1953).

Sylvia's ex-boyfriend Peter Davison told a biographer that at dinner in Wellesley in summer 1955, Sylvia and Aurelia "talked about the Christian Science Monitor, which they were very serious about." [1] Sylvia might have been play-acting, or Davison was maybe making a posthumous dig at her. What's for sure is that Aurelia favored the paper.

Rather than daily photos of bombed-out Ukraine or pits full of corpses, a recent story profiled the survivors of a bombed-out town as they raked up debris, planning to rebuild. Called "human-interest stories," the New York Times published several about Ukraine on 03 July 2023 and pretty much every day now. Regarding the faith, "The Christian Science Perspective" on things is walled off in a daily column of that name. The paper quit publishing poetry around 2016.

Was Sylvia Plath a Christian Scientist? No. Someone told the budding writer she had her best chance of publishing in periodicals she was familiar with. It worked! The editorial staff got to know and publish Sylvia's contributions, even feeble ones, sometimes on its "youth page." [2] Because CSM paid little, like $10 or $15, it was Sylvia's last resort after every other paying publisher rejected poems such as "Midsummer Mobile" (1959).

Was Aurelia Plath a Christian Scientist? No, Aurelia was Unitarian, and saw doctors often. She liked a daily paper low on gore and rumors and higher on human resilience and "decent courageous people." God knows why.

P.S. The Monitor did not re-sell Sylvia's poems to other papers. ("Hey, little Alabama paper, it's the poetry resale desk at the Christian Science Monitor! Need a poem? Mail us a check!") Uh, no. Papers read other papers and lifted what they wanted, mostly as filler. They still do.

[1] Butscher, E., Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness, p. 164.

[2] Sylvia knew that content was feeble, only filler, letter SP to ASP,  21 Oct. 1959.

"I Am More Myself in Letters"

Sylvia Plath was under uniquely monstrous pressure to write happy, reassuring letters home, right?

Dearest Father and Mother! . . . Cable me as soon as you can as soon as you see my latest article in print . . . Your advice is very good, dear mother, I'm keeping my umbrella handy . . .  No, work doesn't really tire me, dearest of parents. But if I do feel fatigue, I stop writing . . .  I really feel very well . . . 

-Theodor Herzl, 1888

. . . I have never met anybody in my life, I think, who loved his mother as much as I love you . . . . the reason I am a poet is entirely because you wanted me to be and intended I should be, even from the very first. You brought me up in the tradition of poetry, and everything I did you encouraged. I cannot remember once in my life when you were not interested in what I was working on, or even suggested that I should put it aside for something else.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay to her mother, 1921

Are you certain that only Sylvia Plath, because she had to, wrote her mother about every little detail?:

I have been in Rome three and a half days and it seems like a whole epoch. I felt at home here more quickly than in other towns I've been to, and I had expected the contrary. Perhaps it is because the first thing I did here was listen to some good music. I arrived about midday on Saturday and congratulated myself on having the rest of the day to look for a hotel. But after I'd got my breath, bought and studied a town-plan and had lunch, it was already 2:30 . . .

-Simone Weil to her mother, 1937

One might argue that these authors' "false selves" wrote these fakey letters full of highlights with no lowlights to please and reassure very needy parents.

Yet on social media we "post" mostly our highlights and successes. Sylvia Plath in her letters "posted" the same.

Give Sylvia some context, such as what other writers wrote to their parents, and how we select our social-media posts, and how often, and it is not so simple as "700 letters means a sick bond with her mother." 

Sylvia had a "following." Aurelia typically read Sylvia's letters aloud to family, friends such as the Nortons and Cantors, or showed them to neighbors or others interested in Sylvia's progress, and Sylvia knew that.

Sylvia said so:

. . . I manage [to write] a weekly vignette to mother and rely on her to disseminate the cultured pearls and grains of sand, such as they are! (to Gordon Lameyer, 12 December 1955)

When Sylvia did not want particular passages "disseminated," she let her mother know:

This is all rather private musing, and I would rather you kept it in the family and shared the most extroverted passages with other people. (to Aurelia, 14 November 1955)

Non-writers might not understand that skilled writers such as Plath could turn up the heat or play it cool depending on their audience. This has nothing to do with a "false self" versus a "true self," as if humans could have only one solid unified self. The self is symphonic!

I think Aurelia savored reading to and sharing with Sylvia's followers to showcase her daughter's success and devotedness. If that is bad, it is just as pathological when modern parents and grandparents showcase brag-worthy offspring to every neighbor and friend and colleague they can collar. Does that mean their lives are empty? No, it means their lives are full. (Before grandparents had cellphones, they bought and carried small photo albums called "brag books," and Aurelia did too.)

Aware that her letters were a family affair, Sylvia liked knowing that while she was under pressure the folks at home cared that she wrote, creatively or otherwise, telling them from England:

I miss that very subtle atmosphere of faith and understanding at home, where you all knew what I was working at and appreciated it, whether it got published or not.

-Sylvia Plath, February 1956

Diary of an Aurelia Plath Researcher

On the train to Independence, 23 January 2023

 To read my Diary, click here or on the Pages tab above.

Top Research Posts of 2022

August 16, 2022: First Known Photo of Otto Plath's parents

July 12: Four Generations of Pop-Up Weddings

June 7: Digitized video footage of Aurelia Plath, permission of Dr. Richard Larschan

April 12: Photo of Otto Plath's first wife and his in-laws

MOST POPULAR POST: January 25, "Otto Plath Was a Pacifist, Not"

PERSONAL FAVES: April 26, Aurelia Schober's college days reconstructed from day planners purchased from eBay; April 19, reviewed the 1986 French-language film of Letters Home, directed by Chantal Akerman

In 2022 this blog had 35 posts. Coming in 2023: "The Lost Lines of 'Eavesdropper,'" and much more.

In March 2022 I chaired a session for "Sylvia Plath Across the Century" and over the conference's two-day span heard many inspiring presentations. In April, I researched recordings and Linda Wagner-Martin's files at the Lilly Library; in July translated Sylvia's German essay into English. In late April, a first and a landmark: The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath was published, with my essay introducing Aurelia's shorthand annotations. In June, transcribed for Dr. Gary Leisig Aurelia's shorthand marginalia on Sylvia's published poems. In October, attended via Zoom definitive sessions of the Sylvia Plath Literary Festival in Hebden Bridge, U.K. In November, consulted with a British author on her draft of Mothers of the Mind, a forthcoming study of the mothers of Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and Agatha Christie. A personal fave: Dr. Amanda Golden at the Woodberry Poetry Room discussing Sylvia Plath's use of pink paper (March 8, 2022; on YouTube here).

A thrilling year in Plath World! As always, English transcriptions of the shorthand on Sylvia Plath's papers can be downloaded from this site at Marquette.edu and viewed.

Four Generations of Rebel Weddings

I read somewhere that Sylvia Plath really stuck it to her mother by announcing, the day Aurelia got off the boat, that she and Ted Hughes (who was there) were getting married in three days: as if triumphantly quashing her mother's dream of a tame and crew-cut son-in-law. Didn't agree then, thinking Sylvia might have been too ecstatic to be mean, but I agree now because I found a pattern of defiant little weddings in her family. Four generations:

• Sylvia's "Grammy" and "Grampy," Aurelia Greenwood and Frank Schober, defying her father, got their marriage license July 3, 1905, the day the bride turned 18 and did not need parental permission. They wed as soon as legally possible: Monday, July 10 at Boston's Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help.
  
• Otto Plath in a Nevada courthouse really stuck it to his estranged and hated first wife with a quick-and-dirty divorce-mill divorce and by marrying Aurelia Schober on the spot the same day: January 4, 1932.
  
• Aurelia's daughter Sylvia Plath with Ted Hughes told her mother, arrived in London for a visit on June 13, 1956, that they were marrying June 16. Aurelia puked up her dinner that night. She was the couple's only guest at St. George the Martyr church in London. (Glimpse its inside, in the church's promotional video.)
  
• Fast-forward to 1979, when Sylvia's daughter Frieda Hughes, "now 'engaged,' will be 19 on April 1," Aurelia Plath wrote a penpal, as if "engaged" was her granddaughter's teenage daydream, and maybe forgetting her own mother married at 18. But Frieda at 19 married a farmhand. It was a rebellious marriage and short. Ted moaned in a letter to a friend that his daughter was divorced at 23.

The Perfect Set-Up (for Aurelia and Otto's First Date)

Let's say your German professor, tall and good-looking, has been favoring you the whole semester, and after you hand in your master's thesis he asks you for a date: a weekend on a farm owned by friends.

Let's get to know each other.  

Your hosts will be two professors who taught your undergrad German courses, really great people: Mr. Haskell and Mrs. Haskell, whom you count among your friends. Every year, undergrads from the grimy Boston campus picnicked for a day on the Haskells' farmette in Walpole. So you have been there four times with classmates and with German professors invited for the day. 

But Plath wasn't your professor then. Today he smells of pomade and aftershave. He is 20 years older than you are, but so was your engineering professor boyfriend, Karl. Your first love. Two years together. Then just before your college graduation, at dinner on your birthday no less, like heaving a brick through glass Karl said he was leaving for the summer, then going home to Austria. Pointedly he did not ask for your hand in marriage.

Two years passed, and then a month ago everyone in town read the newspaper and saw that your ex, Karl -- rich, top of his profession, future chief consultant on the Aswan Dam that stoppers the Nile; you'll secretly keep until the day you die the portrait showing his dueling scar -- is marrying a Radcliffe graduate student, a geologist. Your Bachelor of Secretarial Sciences degree blanches. This master's degree in English and German ought to temper it so no one will ask again whether you qualify to teach languages in high school.

So.

Busy typing your 98-page bilingual thesis, substituting quotation marks for umlauts, you aren't aware that Mr. Plath was doing his homework too. As a graduate student often around the German department, you have chatted with Mr. Haskell, asking after Mrs. Haskell, who teaches B.U.'s vocational students. To Otto Plath they've spilled the tea about your glittering undergraduate career: valedictorian and yearbook editor '28, officer of this and that, faultlessly organized, employed now teaching high school, and as far as they knew not seeing anybody else. Mrs. Haskell met your ex and knows it kills you that he's marrying, but keeps mum. Otto crows about making extra money teaching Middle High German: Miss Schober got 15 students to register when Otto said he'd teach it if she got 10, doubting she'd persuade even five. He doesn't know you chaired the girls' debate team in high school.

(Fifty years later, talking to an audience, event caught on tape, earliest available recording of your voice, you are halting and cowed, fumbling, not at all like you were; and everybody hates you.)

Otto has also asked the dean of liberal arts, a pharaoh among men, Dr. William Marshall Warren, about dating a student, and he said to wait until she finished her coursework. History chair Dr. Warren Ault, Otto's age, right then had a graduate-student fiancee Aurelia's age. Ault said her Latin and typing were excellent. [1]

Otto liked the idea of a warm-hearted intelligent young wife with secretarial and editorial skills. Plus, Miss Schober, Mr. Plath approves of your strong tall frame. You don't know Latin but he will see to it that you learn. You like the idea of having a man take your mind off Karl, for once.

The Haskells offer to host Otto and his prospective date for a weekend after the semester's end. He has only to ask her. Come on, the Haskells say. It's ideal. She won't be scared.

[1] bakerhistoryblog.com, June 18, 2021.