The Most Popular Plath Posts of 2025

Aurelia Plath in this note is outraged that the Smith College infirmary in 1951 gave Sylvia Plath sleeping pills (the two words Aurelia wrote in Gregg shorthand).

Of 2025's total of 44 AureliaPlath.info posts most readers favored the posts I favored, of primary materials and new connections made. I thought I was weird to be obsessed for a week with Sylvia Plath's hairbands and hair ribbons but wrote about them anyway and readers were interested! Sylvia's many mentions of sleeping pills and "phenobarbs," drugs she used to try to kill herself, I had never seen listed or tracked, so I did that. I am glad that readers saw value in that post and hope some might consider further research into Sylvia Plath and drugs.

Having forced myself to read the three books about Assia Wevill now in print (all by U.S. scholar Dr. Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, whom I met in December) I linked Aurelia with Assia for the very first time. They met at Court Green in 1967, really liked each other, and exchanged several letters.

This year's big Plath news was the Plath Family Papers opening for research at Yale University's Beinecke Library. The day before the archive officially opened I was there and also for the next entire workweek, mostly reading Aurelia's diaries, begun with hope in 1924 and ending in 1990. And the Plath and Greenwood heirloom family photographs, stunning and unique, open a casement window into Sylvia's paternal and maternal ancestry and give faces to names.

My fiercest thanks to readers who donated funds for transportation to, from, and within the city of New Haven, Connecticut.

I'm honored that you follow AureliaPlath.info. Despite the many advantages of blogspot.com I became aware this year that it's viewed as a hobbyist's platform, and passion for Plath is too important to keep siloed. So in 2026 I plan to join the bigger league of Substack. Most articles there are free to read. I will keep you informed.

Readers' favorites in 2025:

"I Am the Jew" (January)

"Sylvia Plath and Sleeping Pills" (January) 

"Sylvia Plath and Phyllis McGinley" (March)

"Sylvia Plath's Hair Ribbons and Hairbands" (June)  

"Pleased With Everything: The Plath Family Papers at Yale" (July) 

"Sylvia Died Yesterday" (August) 

"Aurelia Plath and Assia Wevill: Tight Wires Between Them" (October) 

Images from the Plath Family Papers

Aurelia Plath's last diary. These pages from 1989 show variations in Aurelia's handwriting as she struggled with macular degeneration. Emotionally she has just been knocked sidewise after reading the new Plath biography Bitter Fame. 

On the leftward page she noted "Nov. 10 The OPENING OF THE WALL Between East and West Germany! Is light coming to this part of the world as I continually lose my sight?" Just above that, a late-in-life realization: "I should have worked for my own 'career.' Regret so not accepting the 'Dean of Women' post at Northeastern. Bleeding ulcers were still with me then." Young Sylvia had also guilt-tripped Aurelia about taking that job, saying, "For your own self-aggrandizement you would leave us complete orphans!" On the rightward page, on November 12 "(Full Moon!)" Aurelia and her neighbor, financial professional Bill Cruickshank, worked on her accounts until 5:30 p.m. "Think Positive!" she told herself, and under November 17 wrote a catty little note about "uneducated" Dido Merwin, whose searing short memoir about Sylvia is appended to Bitter Fame.

The baby is Aurelia's sister Dorothy, born in May 1911. Aurelia is on the right. They are with their mother Aurelia Greenwood Schober. If the photo is from 1911, Aurelia was five and her mother 23.

The label on this palm-sized diary says "1962 - Catastrophe at Court Green." During the week Ted and Sylvia's marriage fell apart their houseguest Aurelia kept quiet, tended her grandchildren, and wrote in this diary very little of consequence. On July 11 Sylvia shut herself away to write a novel and Aurelia served her dinner in the study. No further details. You'd never know except by reading a later diary that during that week Sylvia angrily told Aurelia, "You are of no use to me here!" and ordered her to move out. The only trace of that in the 1962 diary is a page with names and phone numbers of nearby hotels. It was midsummer and hotels were all booked. Housed with midwife Winifred Davies, Aurelia passed the time reading a book of home remedies, copying out numerous uses of cider vinegar. (I'm not making that up.) Invited back to Court Green a few days later, Aurelia recorded in Gregg shorthand that Sylvia, unable to sleep, eat, or care for her children was sedated by the local doctor. 

The above is the older of two diaries Aurelia definitively censored, this one by ripping out pages and noting, "Tore out all the sad notes made from 1936-40." Wish she hadn't. The other injured diary has several pages from autumn 1958 razored out. Letters from Sylvia hint that was a period of conflict having nothing to do with Sylvia: Aurelia was fighting with her siblings.

A frank and lengthy discussion about reading Aurelia Plath's diaries is free at Substack.

I Was Playing Paper Dolls

Aurelia in Sarasota, Florida, Easter 1967

Early in the Plath Family Papers research I saw I’d been working with paper dolls and of course I had, because between Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Aurelia Plath and I there had never been anything but paper. 

Although they had been real living people, what I’d read determined the faces I gave them and how I clothed them. Gwyneth Paltrow in the movie Sylvia wore upper-middle-class clothes, as if the costumers never met anyone like Sylvia Plath who bought off the rack aspirational clothes not quite so expensive or  flattering. And a whole generation now thinks Sylvia had blue eyes when they were plain common brown. 

That only proved that Sylvia imagined is not a person with an eye color. She is a cutout to be costumed: The Marilyn Monroe of literature, if you like. A feminist. A mystic. Political. Suicidal Esther Greenwood. Clothe her however you want. And instead of outgrowing our Sylvia Plath paper doll we got farther and farther away from the doll and deeper into the paper. Thinking Sylvia is her paper we generate more paper arguing whether paper equals truth. Any eight-year-old can tell you that’s a misapprehension.

In the new Plath Family archives I’m at my keyboard as at a sewing machine upstyling some old togs papered onto Sylvia, Ted, and Otto -- they're all in the archive -- and trying to craft for Aurelia a face and presence I am now privileged to see. Reading Aurelia's diaries and the lists of hundreds of friends in her bursting address book and seeing notes and inks and photos she cherished I felt as if her live warm body was stirring and arose as after a long sleep. She is more alive, more colorful and collected, more Queen Elizabeth II, than the Aurelia on whose life I thought myself an expert.