Aurelia Plath Videos and Audio

Mini-cassette, 1967

Delighted by a lively 1976 radio interview with Aurelia Plath from WGBH-Boston, a recording recently recovered by Peter K. Steinberg, I have created and will keep at the top of this blog a page with links to all publicly available Aurelia media, audio and video, mostly educational films. Click here to access the 30-minute radio interview, interwoven with recordings of Sylvia reading her poems.

See Aurelia In These Two Rare Educational Videos, Now Online

I am pleased to provide (at last!) access through these private links to two made-for-television videos, produced in 2000 for the "Sylvia Plath" segment of The Poets of New England series. They include rare footage of Aurelia Plath. At the time she was filmed (1986) Aurelia was 80 years old, and you bet she gets her say about how Sylvia's poetry creatively transformed her parents, Otto and Aurelia, into figures with the stature of myth.

Dr. Richard Larschan, professor of English and Aurelia's good friend, wrote and narrates these well-wrought 28-minute films woven through with Sylvia's image and recorded voice. 

-The "Monstrous Mother" video interprets "Medusa" ("that stinking poem," Aurelia says), "The Disquieting Muses," "Morning Song," "Kindness," and a portion of "Three Women" which Aurelia recites from memory and savors. 

-The "Omnipresent/Absent Father" features "Ballad Banale," "The Colossus," "Electra on Azalea Path," "Daddy," and the graveyard scene from The Bell Jar. Aurelia appears mostly in this video's first few minutes. Sylvia demonstrated intense creativity as she tried in each poem to articulate her mixed feelings about her father and his early death. Note that for the purpose of this video Sylvia's recording of "Daddy" has been abridged.

I think you'll be surprised, especially by the "Monstrous Mother" video.

These videos are not public. They are available online only through this site. I did not want YouTube ads posted on them. I wanted to preserve for online study the contents of these videos still otherwise confined to VHS format [pictured] and did the transfer at my own expense. Please do not copy, sample, embed, or alter these videos. Thank you.

*Sylvia Plath and the Myth of the Monstrous Mother

*Sylvia Plath and the Myth of the Omnipresent/Absent Father