Errors of Fact in Aurelia's "Letters Home" Introduction

-Aurelia Frances Schober (later Plath) was born and lived her "early childhood" not in Winthrop, Massachusetts, but the working-class neighborhood of Boston called Jamaica Plain. Irish families were settled in Jamaica Plan when Aurelia was born in 1906; Italians began congregating there in 1910. Her family did not move to seaside Winthrop until 1918, when Aurelia would have been 11 or 12, well past early childhood. 

-It was at the close of Aurelia Schober's sophomore year, 1926, when a German-speaking, highly cultured guest professor at MIT hired her as his secretary. Letters Home says this happened "at the close of my junior year (1927)," but his diaries first mention "Miss A. Schober" in August 1926. He was 43, she 20. Aurelia gives broad hints but does not actually name Dr. Karl Terzaghi, or admit that the pair fell in love and dated for two years. Aurelia knew well, from her own notes, that they met in 1926. But placing their first meeting in 1927 makes Aurelia 21 years old instead of 20, shielding Karl, 50 years after the fact, from any jeers about cradle-robbing, and perhaps shielding herself from any side-eye about her naivete

-Otto Plath was born in April 1885 in the "country town of Grabow" in Prussia, but was still an infant when his parents moved 150 miles northwest to Budzyn, where Otto actually "grew up." Otto's five younger siblings were all born in Budzyn, beginning with Paul in December 1886. When Otto arrived in the U.S. he listed his last residence as Budzyn. (8)

-Otto Plath was 15 years old, not 16, when he arrived in the United States on September 9, 1900, according to the ship's manifest. 

-"[w]hen his father, years after his son's arrival here, came to the United States": Correctly, Otto's father Theodor Plath arrived in the U.S. less than a year after Otto did, in March 1901.

-Otto "spoke English without a trace of foreign accent" - those who had met him, interviewed in the 1970s by Harriet Rosenstein, said Otto spoke English with a German accent. (9)

-Frieda Plath Heinrichs, Otto's youngest sister, did not die in 1966 but in 1970. She and her husband's Walter's names appear together in California voter registration rolls until 1968, when Frieda's becomes the only name listed. Walter died May 26, 1967.

-A cost accountant figures out how much money a firm is really spending to put out its product. Aurelia's father Francis Schober was never a "cost accountant" for Boston's Dorothy Muriel bakery company. Rather, in the 1930s the former hotel headwaiter and maitre d' was listed as "manager" of dining rooms; in 1938 it's specifically a Dorothy Muriel bakery-tearoom on Tremont Street, one of a chain of about 50 local Dorothy Muriels. The Boston city directories for the 1940s list a Herman F. Schober, who was a relative, employed as a "cost accountant" for Measurement Engineering and the American Meter Company. Herman F. Schober was born in Boston in 1893, and between 1926 and 1940 the city directory gave his occupation as "foreman." 

Maybe Francis Schober counted the day's proceeds at his own Dorothy Muriel location, but he was never a "cost accountant" for Dorothy Muriel, which had its factory and offices in Allston. (28)

Take Note

-Aurelia Plath is careful to say her two siblings grew up in a matriarchy, but that she as the eldest was the only one of Schobers' children brought up in the European (patriarchal authoritarian) style. The Introduction says: "[m]y father made the important decisions during my childhood and early girlhood" (3) and Aurelia says that it did not occur to her, in her late teens, to argue when her father decreed she would attend either secretarial college or no college.

The Letters Home edition referred to is a hardbacked first edition, 1975.

New: AureliaPlath.info, and an Aurelia Video

Facts about Aurelia Plath need to be "out there" and more available to the public, so I have made two positive changes! This blog can now be accessed using the simpler name Aureliaplath.info. Easier to remember. Then, using some of my research and getting professional guidance, I made a video about Aurelia and Sylvia, 4 minutes 44 seconds, now posted on YouTube. No, I don't appear in it.

I'd like to make more videos about the wealth and vitality of Sylvia Plath studies and the community of Plath scholars and fans.

Move Over, Daddy: Professor Aurelia Plath's University Teaching Career

“Sylvia Plath’s father was an entomologist and professor of biology at Boston University. Her mother was a shorthand teacher” is how biographies commonly explain it when Aurelia Plath’s job is mentioned at all, although she taught for 29 years at the same university. History.com says that after Otto Plath’s death in 1940, “Sylvia’s mother went to work as a teacher.” End of story. Less vague, from poetryfoundation.org: “Aurelia Plath taught advanced secretarial studies at Boston University.”

 

At Boston University, Aurelia was Professor Plath. Sylvia Plath called her that in one letter, but only one. [1] Aurelia Plath’s New York Times obituary calls Aurelia an “associate professor.” Yet no Plath biography or archival materials, including Aurelia’s own writings, answered the question: Professor of what?

 

Seeking information about Aurelia’s work life -- territory entirely unexplored -- I knew only that B.U. hired her in 1942 to establish a medical-secretarial program and teach it. Her employer, Boston University’s College of Practical Arts and Letters, closed in 1955, and B.U.’s College of Business absorbed it. Sounds disastrous, but in fact Aurelia got promoted. Sylvia wrote Ruth Beuscher in 1962 that her mother had lost her job. [2] Is that true? And besides Gregg shorthand, what did Aurelia teach? Can we have any sense at all of how Sylvia Plath’s mother spent most of her days?

 

I found out, thanks to Boston University archivist Jane Parr, who scoured and photocopied B.U. General Catalogue annuals. Meet the other Professor Plath:

 

1942: Instructor in Secretarial Studies

1947: Assistant Professor of Secretarial Studies

1957: Associate Professor of Secretarial Studies, College of Business Administration

1971: Associate Professor of Secretarial Studies, Emerita

 

But really, now: How demanding could secretarial studies be? It’s not as if it was a real discipline like Otto’s, or taught anything serious, right? Here’s a sample of what Aurelia taught, from the 1967-68 Boston University General Catalogue’s course listings, with my commentary:

 

SE 203, 204. MEDICAL SECRETARIAL PROCEDURES. Prerequisite: SE 102, 104, 131, 134.  

 

-Prerequisite SE 102 was Shorthand II; SE 104, Typewriting II. From the B.U. School of Medicine, Professor Plath brought Drs. Alice Marston and Matthew Derow to teach SE 131 and 134:

 

SE 131. Human Biology for Medical Secretaries. Background in anatomy and physiology for the secretary in the physician’s office. Lectures and demonstrations using skeletons, dissections, histological slides, films, and other practical material.

 

SE 134. Bacteriology for Medical Secretaries. Survey of the principles of bacteriology. Application to the fields of food, nutrition, and medical diagnosis.

 

-After acing those courses, you may enroll in Professor Plath’s 12-credit two-semester course:

 

SE 203-204. MEDICAL SECRETARIAL PROCEDURES. Development of secretarial skills, with emphasis on accuracy and speed in transcribing from shorthand and from recording machines. Use of office machines, including the IBM Executive typewriter. Medical terminology and transcription of medical case histories and correspondence. Practical problems in office and records management, including filing systems.

 

-The medical-secretarial student then faced SE 232, which Professor Plath might have coordinated, but others must have taught:

 

MEDICAL SECRETARIAL LABORATORY. Lectures and demonstrations in hematology, clinical pathology, tissue pathology, and clinical chemistry. Lectures and library research in areas related to the present-day practice of medicine. Field trips.

 

-I cannot prove, but I will bet, that Professor Plath taught also the course SE 419, limited to senior students in the Business Education division:

 

SHORTHAND METHODS LABORATORY. Perfection through practice of the basic techniques of teaching shorthand, such as blackboard shorthand writing, introduction of principles and brief forms, and dictation.

 

-Aurelia’s boss at that time was Donald G. Stather, Professor of Secretarial Studies and Business Education; B.S. in Ed., State College at Salem; Ed.M., Ed.D., Boston University. He supervised an all-female faculty of five.

 

Then, in the 1969-70 General Catalogue, the College of Business Administration announced:

 

The programs in Secretarial Studies have been discontinued with the last entering class in September 1968. Students presently enrolled in the program should consult the Division of Secretarial Studies for curriculum requirements.

 

The end was near for what must have been among the most rigorous of medical secretarial programs. In 1970, Professor Plath was age 64, one year away from mandatory retirement. B.U.’s pension plan for profs was 20 percent of their salary. [3] Lacking the money to retire, Professor Plath hoped for five more years of teaching work at Cape Cod Community College, where she taught secretarial studies from the autumn of 1970 until 1973. Then Professor Plath asked for and was granted time off to edit Letters Home.

 

[1] SP to ASP, November 22, 1962, refers to Aurelia as “Professor A.S. Plath.”

[2] SP to Ruth Beuscher, September 22 and 29, 1962.

[3] ASP to Hilda Farrar, April 20, 1970.

A favorite piece of Aureliana: B.U. President John Silber’s letter promoting Aurelia into joblessness, with Aurelia's correction of his Latin.

"Do Not Let Mother See This!"

Sample of Aurelia's shorthand.

It is false to say Sylvia Plath’s “letters home” to Wellesley were written for her mother’s eyes and gratification only. Although addressed to Aurelia Plath, Sylvia’s letters were in fact written for the Plath household, including Sylvia’s brother and grandparents, and Aurelia shared the letters soon after receipt with other relatives and friends, such as Marcia Brown Stern.

 

Sylvia was aware of that, because in some letters she asks Aurelia to keep them confidential. For example, Sylvia’s letter of February 24, 1956, says, “I am being very naughty and self-pitying in writing you a letter which is very private. . .” This suggests Sylvia typically felt obligated to keep her letters family-friendly, but in this case singled out her mother for more intimate communication.

 

The first sentence in Aurelia’s introduction to Letters Home (1975), a book often characterized as “Sylvia’s letters to her mother,” explicitly states that Sylvia wrote the letters to her “family.” Aurelia specifies that “family” includes Warren Plath and Olive Higgins Prouty. Aurelia did not tell readers she acted as a curator, deciding on her own and case-by-case who else should be allowed to read or hear her read Sylvia’s letters. We learn this from Aurelia’s shorthand annotations on some of Sylvia’s original letters, now in the Lilly Library at Indiana University.

 

Aurelia wrote her annotations mostly on envelopes. (Aurelia was the only person in the family able to read or write Gregg shorthand.) I have transcribed all her “share/don’t share” annotations, appearing on seven letters in all, and present here the transcriptions and the date of the letter they’re associated with. Use your copies of Plath’s Collected Letters to figure out why Aurelia might have made these curatorial decisions.

 

·      share with Gordon if the time is right.  1954, August 30 ["Gordon" was Plath's steady boyfriend.]

 

·      do not share   1955, October 5

 

·      (do not share) 1955, November 14

 

·      do not share!  1955, December 5

 

·      Do not let Mother see this!   1956, March 9  [“Mother” means Aurelia’s mother, Sylvia’s “Grammy,” who lived in the household and was then dying of cancer. Sylvia asked Aurelia to keep this letter private.]

 

·      do not let Dot or Frank see this.  1960, January 16 [“Dot” is Aurelia’s sister and Sylvia’s “Aunt Dot”; “Frank” is Aurelia’s brother. Neither lived in the Plaths’ home.]

 

·      don’t share    1962, October 21  [“don’t share” is written twice on this letter, on the inside and the outside.]

 

A few things to know: 1) Dozens of Sylvia’s letters home, especially in her first years at college, were penny postcards and openly readable. 2) We cannot rightly assume that Aurelia shared with others all the letters which she did not mark “do not share.” 3) Aurelia penciled in shorthand on Sylvia’s letter of April 25, 1951, “file in safe in my bedroom.” That letter she really didn’t want to leave lying around. Why? 4) Aurelia also read Warren Plath’s “letters home” aloud to visitors (Sylvia Plath to Warren, July 6, 1955).

Aurelia Plath's Live-In Students

In her letter of September 28, 1956, Sylvia Plath responded with horror to her mother’s idea to rent out a room in the family home in Wellesley: “So glad you aren’t renting room. DON’T!” Sylvia – then living temporarily with her in-laws in England – went on to explain why sharing living space was awful.

But in 1957 Sylvia heartily approved of the familiar "Aunt Marion" Freeman, Aurelia's friend and mother of Sylvia's childhood playmates, moving in with Aurelia during the year Ted and Sylvia were in the United States. "Aunt Marion" lived with Aurelia at least until May 1958. [1]  

So it wasn't unprecedented when, after Sylvia's death, Aurelia took in at least two more roomers. These were young women, her students from Boston University.  

In 1966, Aurelia was living alone in a house full of memories. Sylvia was three years dead; Aurelia's father had died the year before. Ted Hughes had written Aurelia forbidding her to visit England in 1966; it was the first summer in five years Aurelia would not see her grandchildren. Aurelia wrote on Hughes' letter, in black marker, "BOMB #1" -- signifying that she made this annotation in retrospect -- and drew a tearful face. Then the sensational U.S. release of Ariel in June let the whole world know Aurelia's daughter had killed herself. Strangers phoned asking whether Sylvia's "Daddy" had really been a Nazi. It was as if Sylvia had died a second time. Aurelia, overwhelmed, couldn't eat or sleep.

During that turbulent year Aurelia had a student living with her. To her friend Miriam Baggett on April 19, 1966, Aurelia wrote, “When my 19-year-old student is here with me, I can submerge myself in her interests and problems.” On July 7 Aurelia wrote Baggett about “my teenager here” who “spills out her difficulties nightly.” The student is never named.

 

Ten years later a journalist came to the Wellesley house to profile Aurelia for Boston University’s alumnae magazine. She mailed Aurelia a draft of her article. Aurelia struck out its whole third paragraph, which read: “When one favorite student contracted mononucleosis and thought she would have to quit school, [Mrs.] Plath brought her home for ‘rest and relaxation’ and the young woman ended up staying for two years. Today they still maintain their friendship.” [2] 

 

This was a different student. This longer-term roomer occupied the Wellesley house while Aurelia taught at Cape Cod Community College during 1970-71. In July 1970 Aurelia wrote her longtime friend and former high-school student Mary Stetson Clarke: “I shall let a friend live in my house here -- she is with me now five days a week . . . she returns to her home every Friday evening for the weekend.” In April 1971 Aurelia wrote, again to Clarke: “If my good friend can continue to live in my Wellesley home . . .” The arrangement must have been satisfactory.

 

So Aurelia’s having occasional live-ins was not a secret, but Aurelia -- by 1976 known for editing Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home -- did not want her fellow Boston University alumnae or the wider public to know.

 

The friendship with the second student was durable. Aurelia told a correspondent in 1983 that her "one-time student friend, who is now with her own family spending a year in Wurtzburg, West Germany," had recently phoned and her voice "came through with perfect clarity." [3] 

 

[1] Sylvia Plath to Aurelia S. Plath, 24 May 1957.

[2] The draft is in Smith College’s Sylvia Plath Papers IX, “Aurelia Plath.” The published article is “Aurelia Plath: A Lasting Commitment,” by Linda Heller, in Bostonia (Boston University alumnae magazine) Spring 1976, 36.

[3] ASP to Mary Ann Montgomery, 12 May 1983.

"Forbidden Fruit": Aurelia Plath's Poems*

 

 

Aurelia Schober was 17 years old when her high-school yearbook, The Echo, 1923, published her poem "Forbidden Fruit." The Winthrop, Massachusetts High School yearbook, like many high-school and college yearbooks of the time, printed samples of students' creative writings. Aurelia's college yearbook in 1928 published another of her poems, unsigned (p. 196), but in the 1970s Aurelia Schober Plath identified it for Plath biographer Harriet Rosenstein:

 

A CHILD'S WISH

 

The sky is blue and the wind blows free,

Oh come for a run on the beach with me!

 

We will delve in the sand and race with the waves

We will jump on the rocks where the salt sea laves,

We will ponder the driftwood strewn up by the tide,

We will search for a cavern where mermaidens hide.

 

And then in a calm we might hear a roar

Of very great waves on a distant shore.

Far out on the point a light tow'r we see,

Oh won't you come for a run with me?

 

Emotionally and technically "A Child's Wish" is such a regression that if Aurelia wrote it after writing "Forbidden Fruit," and after reading contemporary poetry books that we know Aurelia owned and annotated, such as Sara Teasdale's Dark of the Moon (1926) and Edna St. Vincent Millay's The King's Henchman (1927), "A Child's Wish" might be a "decoy" or "dummy" poem. Remember, Aurelia in 1928 was not yet married, a mother, or a schoolteacher, so did not write this poem for her children.

 

A "decoy" poem is what a college student caught in and crushed by a fiery love affair with a man 22 years older writes to show her parents, who want her to be a secretary, that she is still pure and innocent. Aurelia was her college yearbook's editor that year. The yearbook's creative-writing pages printed 17 pieces, all unsigned; at the end are listed ten different authors, including Aurelia. What I call a "dummy" poem is a bloodless exercise on an unobjectionable topic, such as a child on the beach. Maybe a reader of "Forbidden Fruit" had hinted to Aurelia that young women should not write, for all the world to see, about succumbing to temptation, and suggested to her that poetry in general led into morally dubious territory.

Or else "A Child's Wish" was the best Aurelia could do.

 

Aurelia's annotations on her daughter Sylvia Plath's letters and papers show how habitually Aurelia expressed one thing while thinking another. Proof that she wasn't born that way is that Aurelia never hid her feelings well. What's building as I research Aurelia's life is a picture of young Aurelia as a leader, intrepid, adventurous, game; then backpedaling. Sylvia too played at feminine artifice, but became renowned for finally telling it like it was.

Aurelia also wrote a greeting-card-type poem for her daughter Sylvia's 13th birthday, rather cliche, nothing special. Yet it is fortunate for literature that Aurelia loved poetry and had practiced the craft, hands-on, and then guided and supported her gifted Sylvia, although Aurelia herself ultimately gave it up.

*Aurelia Plath did not compose the poem "Rebecca," about a little girl with a doll, Rebecca, who "caught a chill" and needed special care. The poem, credited to Eleanor Piatt, first appeared in St. Nicholas, a magazine for children, vol. 36, in 1909. Aurelia copied it into a letter she sent to Sylvia in 1938, specifying that it was a poem she had enjoyed as a child.

Why Was Sylvia Plath Shut Out From Harvard Summer School?

Sylvia Plath’s summer 1953 breakdown and suicide attempt are said to have hinged on being denied admission to author Frank O’Connor’s short-story-writing course at Harvard Summer School. The course catalog said enrollment was limited, but how was it that Plath, a well-published writer at age 20, was not admitted?

 

Irish-born writer O’Connor (1903-1966) in 1953 was internationally famous, a literary star. Enrollment in his course that summer was not restricted to undergraduates or Boston-area locals. Anyone could apply. The catalog entry stated only a preference for those with some experience in creative or critical writing.

 

Plath recorded her very reasonable doubts about competing for admission with “professional writers and grown-ups” from across the nation (CL1, 636). Plath saw the summer-school course catalog in March (CL1, 586), but applied only after Harvard offered her a $75 scholarship, news that arrived at her home in Wellesley around June 3. Plath was in New York for the month. Her mother Aurelia Plath, opening Sylvia’s mail, relayed this information, and also that O’Connor’s course required applicants to send in a writing sample. Plath asked her mother to retype her story “Sunday at the Mintons’” and mail it to her in New York. From there Plath mailed her sample between June 8 and 13 (CL1, 636).

 

Andrew Wilson’s 2013 biography Mad Girl’s Love Song hazards that because Wilson did not find Harvard’s rejection letter among the hundreds of other letters in Plath archives, Mrs. Aurelia Plath “perhaps” intercepted and destroyed what was in fact an acceptance letter so as to keep Plath at home serving family members that summer (pp. 209-212). If so, it was the only time Mrs. Plath shot down her writer daughter’s rising star to get her own way. Biographer Carl Rollyson gave no source for a claim that O’Connor deemed Plath “too advanced for his class” (American Isis, 64). Heather Clark’s Red Comet notes that source is an unpublished Plath biography archived at College Park, Maryland. 

 

All of that is wrong.

 

It is unlikely that Mrs. Plath, an educator, plotted to deny her daughter instruction from the moment’s most celebrated short-story writer at the nation’s most prestigious university, where Sylvia might write stories to sell for badly needed money. Wilson guesses that Sylvia was fooled but then discovered, too late, her mother’s treachery, triggering that summer's matricidal and suicidal urges. The “Sylvia was too advanced” theory flatters Plath. A 2010 essay by Peter K. Steinberg reasoned:

 

Plath had, after all, published five stories and four poems in Seventeen and Mademoiselle before June 1953. In addition, she had three poems and three journalism pieces in The Christian Science Monitor, and more than two dozen articles published anonymously as a Press Board correspondent in the Daily Hampshire Gazette and Springfield Daily News. While she had no published criticism, it would be surprising if other candidates for O’Connor’s class had such a résumé. (1)

 

This ingenue’s résumé might not have impressed O’Connor, an Irish Republican Army veteran, former political prisoner, W.B. Yeats’ playwriting protege at Dublin’s Abbey Theater, biographer, poet, translator, critic, memoirist, and fiction writer. Knopf published his collected stories in 1952. An O’Connor biography, quoting O’Connor's assistant, said Plath’s writing sample made O’Connor think her “demented” and when Plath’s suicide attempt made local and national news that summer O’Connor said it proved he had been right (2). Mrs. Plath wrote in Letters Home (LH, 123) and elsewhere that Sylvia’s application, sent in mid-June, was a late one for a course that began on July 6 and had already filled.

 

In Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, a careworn Esther Greenwood, just back from New York, sourly accepts this bad news. Esther soon receives and opens for herself a follow-up letter:

 

Propped on the table I found a long, businesslike letter from the summer school and a thin blue letter on leftover Yale stationery, addressed to me in Buddy Willard’s lucid hand.

 

I slit open the summer school letter with a knife.

 

Since I wasn’t accepted for the writing course, it said, I could choose some other course instead, but I should call in to the Admissions Office that same morning, or it would be too late to register, the courses were almost full. (Bell Jar, 97)

 

If this second letter is as much fact as fiction, and O’Connor’s assistant told the biographer the truth, Harvard and not Aurelia Plath denied Sylvia admission to the writing course, the only course she cared to take that year. Sylvia Plath’s Journals (pp. 185-187, pp. 546-549) show her weighing and dismissing summer-school alternatives and choosing, for financial and not familial reasons, to stay home in Wellesley and write on her own.

 

Maybe O’Connor’s choice not to admit Plath to his writing course was unfair. Maybe, as Steinberg suggests, “Plath’s creative self . . .was still forming,” meaning Plath was adolescent and so was her work. At age 20 no writer, even Plath, is too advanced to learn from a successful writer with 30 years’ experience and an international reputation. “You are too advanced” is to this day a common rebuff to an applicant maybe naïve enough to believe it. “The course has filled” also softens a “No.” For whatever reason, “no” was a disappointment, the greater because Plath had planned her entire summer around O’Connor’s course.

 

Showing professionalism rare in disappointed young writers, Plath never groused in writing that O’Connor had misjudged her tremendous value or that her qualifications had entitled her to admission--or that it was Mother’s fault she didn’t get in. Plath wrote in her journal that the course “was closed to me” (J 543), and to correspondent Eddie Cohen that she had felt “miffed” (CL1, 655) rather than devastated or furious. In a few years she would pore over O’Connor’s stories, seeking the secrets of success.

 

(1) Peter K. Steinberg, “They Had to Call and Call: The Search for Sylvia Plath,” Plath Profiles 2010, p. 108.

 

(2) My blog post of November 1, 2022 documents in detail the source of this remark, mentioned in passing in Deirdre Blair’s “Enmity, Torment, Adversity,” review of Voices: A Life of Frank O’Connor, The New York Times, Section 7, page 11, May 22, 1983.

Inside "Ocean 1212-W"

892 Shirley Street, Winthrop, Mass. USA, photographed in 2018.

Sylvia Plath claimed her grandparents' house at Point Shirley as her true childhood home and spiritual nexus in a 1962 essay we know as "Ocean 1212-W." Prepare for a unique and savory treat: Aurelia's Austrian beau Karl in 1926 described in his diary his first view of and visit to the town of Winthrop and Point Shirley, and an evening in Aurelia's family home. Present were her parents (later "Grammy" and "Grampy" Schober; Karl culls a few new facts) and Aurelia's siblings, future aunt and uncle to Sylvia and Warren. More about Karl here. I discovered this passage in May and you are the first to read it. It's verbatim and I think beautiful. Thanks to the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute for granting access to the Karl Terzaghi diaries. Diary page numbers are in the brackets.

Diary 26.1, p. 104 October 24, 1926

Yesterday, Saturday, met A. at the [105] Public library, lunch among lights and colors at Brau Haus, a delightful, quiet hour. After lunch to Orient Heights, from hill above station one of the most beautiful views of Boston I ever saw. Beacon Hill in blue grey against the lighter sky, dominated by the Custom House tower. Chelsea: a series of drumlins with gentle skyline covered with grey houses. At the foot of the hill the red brown saltmarshes with wide, winding channels, mother of pearl; so beyond Beachmont N.E., the silver grey ocean, the horizon behind the flat, grey shape of Nahant Island on the horizon & in the East [106] the friendly hills and narrows & peninsula of Winthrop. From the Orient Heights we wandered across Winthrop, & on the Boulevard, along the beach, from Drumlin to Drumlin: Grovers Cliff, Winthrop Head and out to Shirley Point: the ocean calm, in color reminding the Persian sea, now and then a low, gentle wave breaking at the beach. Dark stone standing out of the water – low tide, a brown belt of sea weed stretching between the water and the seawall – the dominating white water tank of Winthrop [107] Head standing like the tower of a Sarazene castle – and the dear little girl with shining brown eyes, showing her treasures, the beach, and the walls and the sea she loves. An evening in her home at Shirley Point, remote from the world. Her mother a plump little lady with irregular features, brutish forehead, but lovable and kind and goodnatured. The father, who arrived somewhat later, serious, official, simple, but sincere, agreeable, regular features. Assistant manager of the Alston Manor. The light and [108] the beauty of the home: The children. Sitting at the fireplace, fed with driftwood, paved with cobblestones from the Drumlins. A., the oldest, with her gentle, lovable features, her sister, fifteen, a strong husky girl, with clear, open grey eyes, blond, straight hair and a strong nice chin, and finally came the little boy, warm from his bed, insisted to see me, tried to behave like a little man, and explained to me his monkey. – About storms in Winthrop, the breakers washing through the gaps between the houses, the children [109] spending days on the beach, in bathing suits, in direct touch with gentle and violent nature – the library in Shirley Point, grocery store a little world in itself. The father from Aussee, Gasthof Schober, wanted to study medicine, some time in Italy, met in London brother of his wife, both went over to Boston and settled. His brother-in-law headwaiter at Copley Plaza. The early days of the young couple, tramping up in White Mountains, since then living in this little home, no travels, except the family for short time [110] to Colorado Springs – her father.

            Towards eleven I left, went with A. and her father around the Shirley Point back to W. station beautiful moonlight, the ocean calm. The dear little girl tight at my side and while we walked behind her father, I told her silently how I felt, by a kiss.

            Today, a quiet day, still under the impression of yesterday’s evening. The picture of the girl was with me: her innocence, her happiness at her wealth in her modest surroundings, the [111] blessings of an education paid for by the self restraint of conscientious parents, a bud, on the point of becoming a flower – her lovable way of nursing the smaller ones of the family, the drumlins and the ocean as a background. I had the feeling as if I had found something I was longing for since years.

Sylvia Plath and Speedwriting

c. 1960s

Sylvia Plath did learn a form of shorthand -- "Speedwriting," the "cn u rd ths" note-taking system invented in the 1920s by Emma B. Dearborn, a suicide, and persistently advertised for 50 years in the unglamorous back pages of Mademoiselle, but also in Popular Mechanics, Glamour, and Ebony: pretty much everywhere. Plath certainly saw these now-iconic ads; they ran in the August 1953 issue of Mademoiselle Plath had guest-edited. Mademoiselle had the last word, printing in September 1977 the latest Speedwriting ad I could find. It said, in plain block letters, "Yes, I went to college. But Speedwriting got me my job."

And so it was with Smith and Cambridge graduate Sylvia Plath who couldn't get her secretarial job at Harvard in 1959 without it. I wrote a paper, "Sylvia Plath and Speedwriting," that goes into depth about the topic. It includes the history of Emma Dearborn, her invention of Speedwriting and why it became big business, when and where Sylvia learned and used Speedwriting, and why she wanted to use it again while living in London. There are no known examples of Sylvia's Speedwriting, but some might yet be discovered. 

Shorthand and 1950s office practice and office machines will always be relevant in Plath studies, as they were in her life. Plath's clerical and secretarial skills -- typing poetry manuscripts, keeping track of submissions, filing carbon copies, answering editors' letters -- were essential to Plath's career and her husband's. My paper was published in Plath Profiles, vol. 11, 2019.

The First-Ever Aurelia Panel

The Sylvia Plath Conference at Ulster University hosted an unprecedented "Aurelia panel," titled "'Old Barnacled Umbilicus': Considering Aurelia Plath." I was delighted to have as co-panelists Dr. Adrianne Kalfopoulou of The American College of Greece, and Dr. Janet Badia, of Indiana University-Purdue University. "Panel on Aurelia is on fire!" said a tweet from our audience as we knocked it out of the park. Some other comments: "Jaw hit the floor." "Mic drop."

Cathleen Allyn Conway chaired a thrilling 90 minutes that acknowledged that Sylvia Plath had a mother, or shall we say a parent, who introduced her to poetry and helped shape her voice, as Dr. Kalfopoulou described in her paper, "Witches in the Gingerbread: The Making of the Plathian Voice." After Dr. Badia presented "'There is nothing between us': Mother-Daughter Intimacy in the Plath Archive," there can be no question Aurelia was Plath's first and most important poetry critic. During her formation and as an adult, Plath sent her mother sheaves of poems, requesting feedback.

I'm not saying Plath loved or used all her mother offered. We don't know, right now, what her mother offered. Plath burned her mother's letters. Like any daughter Plath worked against her mother's influence as much as with it. But you can't do either without first having a mother who has influence.

Bolstered by the new Volume One of Plath's complete letters, most of them to Aurelia and her family, the Aurelia panel provided Plath biographical scholarship with much-needed corrective lenses. We have liked to believe with the Romantics that artists create themselves and their work independent of their contexts, cultures and families. But those provide the support and friction that help a born artist become a consummate and pathbreaking artist.

Which Shorthand Did Aurelia Teach?

Gregg shorthand, its first manual published in 1888 by Robert Gregg, who initially called his phonetic shorthand system "Light-Line Phonography," evolved along with the business world’s requirements and vocabulary. Periodic revisions also made it leaner and easier to learn. 

Aurelia Schober (b. 1906) was probably schooled in what is now called “Pre-Anniversary” Gregg, likely that edition’s fifth and final iteration (1916). In 1929 the “Anniversary” edition superseded it. Mrs. Plath would have taught that edition at Boston University’s College of Practical Arts and Letters from the time she was hired in 1942 until the “Simplified” edition of Gregg came out in 1949. The “Simplified” edition was later superseded by the “Diamond Anniversary” edition (1963-1978), the edition I learned.

No iteration of Gregg is a truly radical departure, but each can be different enough so that, for example, a single shorthand character formerly transcribed as “love” now represents the phrase “will have.” Gregg’s efficiency is such that the stroke representing “d” can also be read as “would,” “did,” “dear,” “date,” “dollars,” or the suffixes “-ward” or “-hood”; pre-1963 it might also represent the diphthong “ch”. Context is everything. Change the angle slightly and write it as a downstroke instead of an upstroke and it's the letter "j." How to know an upstroke from a downstroke? Context is everything.

"Medusa's Metadata" - Plath Conference Paper

Nearly 700 letters from Sylvia Plath to her mother, Mrs. Aurelia Schober Plath, are held in the Sylvia Plath mss. II files at the University of Indiana’s Lilly Library. Mrs. Plath, a professional instructor of Gregg shorthand, wrote on these letters and their envelopes scores of comments and notes to herself and to posterity. One hundred fifty-nine annotations in the Plath mss. II correspondence are in in Gregg shorthand. Never before cataloged or transcribed, the shorthand annotations on Plath’s letters, labeled “unreadable” and ignored, provide new metadata about Plath—who rather famously never learned shorthand—and her uneasy relationship with her only surviving parent and provider.

The transcriptions include Mrs. Plath’s most urgent and personal responses to her daughter’s needs, marriage, suicide, and posthumous fame; bitter negotiations with Ted Hughes over the U.S. publication of The Bell Jar; and detail Mrs. Plath’s role as curator of her daughter’s correspondence: with friends (“Share with Gordon if the time is right,” 30 August 1954), family (“Do not let Mother [Granny] see this!” 2 February 1956) and ultimately the public (Letters Home, 1975). That role does not end with the publication of two volumes of The Complete Letters of Sylvia Plath. In fact, Mrs. Plath is that collection's first cause.

While Everyone Was Reading The Bell Jar . . .

The Bell Jar was new in the U.S. when I was in high school, and reading about Esther Greenwood's unnamed mother trying to force steno on her daughter, I was delighted and envious that Esther had been allowed to refuse. Little did I know I'd end up transcribing The Bell Jar's author's mother's shorthand.

Here's my high-school transcript. The left side records the office-skills track my own mother determined I would take. The Gregg shorthand courses were 1972-73's STENO 32 and 1973-74's STENO 42, graded B and A respectively.

The courses with "1.00" lasted all year; the .50 courses, one semester.