Showing posts with label jacqueline rose. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jacqueline rose. Show all posts

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Aurelia's Journals

I pinpointed a primary and secondary source mentioning Aurelia Plath's journals. In Jacqueline Rose's book The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991), in a chapter called "The Archive," on page 81, Rose writes, "As Aurelia Plath put it in an interview conducted in 1976, she had herself wanted to be a writer but didn't feel she could expose her children to the uncertainty of a writer's life." [Footnote 61].

The footnote said this interview is by Linda Heller, and titled "Aurelia Plath: A Lasting Commitment," received by Smith College, 24 February 1976. It adds, "Aurelia's notes for a talk on 16 March 1976 to the Wellesley College Club were in part based on the journal she kept at that time."

This footnote does not make it clear whether that information appears in the interview, or whether the interview was published ("received" is not "published"), and it isn't clear whether the journal referred to was a 1976 journal or earlier. The notes for the talk are at the Mortimer Library, Smith College.

Reference to a journal is echoed in a book by Luke Ferretter, Sylvia Plath's Fiction (2010), page 12, except in the body of the text, not as a footnote, and specifies the journal is from 1962:


Aurelia kept a journal (calling it a diary); she says so in Letters Home. She quotes her entry of August 3, 1958, on page 348 of the Harper & Row hardback. Her diaries from 1958 and especially 1962 would be an amazing resource; I wonder where they are, and if they are in shorthand, or partly so, and whether that is what keeps them obscure.