Burning The Letters: Aurelia's "Eyewitness" Account

From a 1976 interview of Aurelia Plath by Robert Roberton, published in The Listener, Vol. 95, p. 516. Aurelia had just described Sylvia Plath's sequel to The Bell Jar, an autobiographical novel "provisionally titled The Hill of Leopards," about an American Fulbright student who marries and has her first child in England.

Roberton: And yet I believe that you saw this manuscript destroyed.
Aurelia Plath: Yes, this was one of the most terrible experiences of my life, really. She had built an enormous bonfire in the court outside her home in Devon. I stood in the doorway, holding her little daughter by the hand, and holding the boy, her son, in my arms, not able to go to her. And then I saw her emerge from the household with her arms full of manuscripts, and I saw the second volume, in rough draft, which was to be a gift to, and a surprise, to her husband -- she tore the pages apart bit by bit and fed them into the flames. She fed much else into the flames.
Roberton: There was no way of stopping her?
Aurelia Plath: No, I couldn't. I couldn't leave the children.

The above, which supposedly happened on Aurelia's visit to Court Green in summer 1962, is probably false. In an unpublished version of the introduction to Letters Home, Aurelia describes in elaborate detail Sylvia sitting her down earlier on that visit and reading to her from this manuscript supposedly in honor of and dedicated "To Ponter" (Sylvia's private nickname for her husband Ted). 

This assumes that Sylvia had labored over a lengthy creative work she intended as a gift, but Sylvia wrote for money and never wasted any of her scant and precious writing time on giveaways. She had already dedicated The Colossus to Ted. Sylvia left no trace of this supposed second "happy" novel: no rough drafts, no calendar notations, no mentions in letters, nothing.

Aurelia wanted readers to believe that Sylvia after writing The Bell Jar -- a brutal novel which harmed Aurelia's reputation and the other real people it caricatured -- wrote a joyous novel about an Esther-Greenwood-type character in love, married, and having a baby, an "anti-Bell Jar" that unfortunately the author burned after showing it only to Aurelia. Sylvia did write her mother on March 4, 1962, that she had begun writing something lighter that might turn into a novel.

While writing The Bell Jar in 1961, and preparing it for publication during 1962, Sylvia wrote notes in her calendar and letters to her brother, her agent, friends, and publishers -- keeping the book secret only from her mother. Of the lighter manuscript or the  "joyous" "second novel" Sylvia made no mention. Aurelia's editor rightly deleted from the draft of Letters Home Aurelia's "she read to me from the second novel" episode. It could not be verified, and the anecdote as written rang false. Aurelia had Sylvia saying that art and life were not the same, something Aurelia dearly wished her daughter would have said.

After confirming Ted's adultery in July 1962, Sylvia began an angry novel about a cheating husband titled The Interminable Loaf and then renamed Double Exposure. That manuscript actually existed, because Sylvia mentioned it in letters and on her calendar, and Ted and Olwyn Hughes and Assia Wevill read the unfinished 60 or 70 pages after Plath died. All were horrified by Plath's savage caricatures of themselves. Gosh, when they received The Bell Jar treatment, just like Aurelia they didn't like it at all! That manuscript is considered "lost" and rumor says it might one day be found.

Biographers have guessed that Sylvia burned all her mother's letters in July 1962 or soon after, but Aurelia did not say that, at least in 1976. Aurelia would have mentioned somewhere in her many letters to others, or in Letters Home, how much the burning of her letters hurt or disappointed her.

Primary Materials About Aurelia Plath

Seeking primary materials by and about Aurelia Plath, I've learned:

1) Sylvia Plath is said to have burned all her mother's letters to her ("upward of a thousand") in a bonfire in Devon in 1962. Only ten survive in the archives at Lilly Library at Indiana University and at Smith College. One interesting item is a Christmas card Sylvia kept in her purse, given by Ted to Warren and Maggie Plath at the time of Sylvia's funeral in 1963. Bridget Anna Lowe unearthed its story and wrote about it in Plath Profiles 5: Summer 2012.
2) There is no Aurelia Plath archive.
3) The JSTOR database lists no scholarly articles about Aurelia Plath. One unpublished thesis, "The influence of Aurelia Plath on Sylvia Plath: an interpretative biography," was written in 1977.
4) Aurelia kept her own journals, but they are not in any archive.
5) Aurelia's post-1977 letters are at Smith College; the ones actually sent to Ted Hughes are at Emory, although some drafts and carbons are at the Lilly Library.
6) Chief among Aurelia's primary materials is Letters Home, of course, but according to a review of Lessons from the Archive: Sylvia Plath and The Politics of Memory in Feminist Studies (Vol. 31, No. 3, 2005), "the full text of Aurelia Plath's intended introduction has not been published." That is true! Omitted is an anecdote about young Sylvia's sense of humor, and a passage saying the Plath children's questions about sex were always honestly answered and discussed. Lilly Library and Smith hold original and revised Letters Home typescripts.
7) Aurelia was interviewed by journalists and at least two filmmakers. At Washington University I found and copied an interview that was listed but had not been digitized: "Sylvia Plath's Letters Home: Some Reflections by Her Mother," by Robert Robertson in The Listener, Vol. 95, 1976, p. 515. In it Aurelia describes watching Sylvia build a bonfire and burning her second novel and "much else." This contradicts what The Other Ariel (page 57) says: "Aurelia Plath, visiting her daughter from June 21 to August 3, leaves no account of the incident immortalized by the poem ["Burning the Letters"].
8) Aurelia Plath's "Letter in the Actuality of Spring," in Ariel Ascending (1985), edited by Paul Alexander (pp. 214-217) is called an essay, but a footnote explains it's an excerpt from a letter. Alexander provided the title and received Aurelia's permission to print it as an essay.