"I Love Her Work, I Hate Her Mom"

Looking for the root of the general contempt for Aurelia Plath, I thought some popular article or influential essay, some Ur-takedown, must have seeded it. Whether Aurelia deserves contempt is not the issue here. Contempt is in place before Sylvia's abridged Journals (1982) reveal Sylvia's now-canonical "hate her hate her" entry. It precedes the Letters Home backlash (1975). It precedes "Mrs. Greenwood's" appearance in The Bell Jar (U.S., 1971), "her face a perpetual accusation," the review in the New Yorker  said, although the novel does not say that.

Critical contempt was in place by 1970, when researcher Harriet Rosenstein, planning a Plath biography, interviewed Aurelia in Wellesley. Previous interviewees briefed Rosenstein on the whole tragic Plath story, and Rosenstein's interview notes show frustration at what Aurelia did not say (Aurelia never said "suicide") and judged what lay beneath what Aurelia did say: bitterness, resignation--nothing good. No other interviewee, of about sixty in all (and we are very grateful for these interviews), gets treated as if they failed a test of character. Rosenstein later reminded herself that her book's purpose was not to nail Aurelia to the wall but to explain the Ariel poems.

The Bell Jar in German, 1968

Rosenstein's biography was never published. In her early twenties, a feminist and up on the trends, she had read The Bell Jar in its U.K. edition and learned Esther hated her mother. Rosenstein located a short German review (1968) of the German translation of The Bell Jar. It said, "the mother smiles, suffering and forgiving and being a little too sweet." That scrap of a critique must have been reassuring, since U.K. reviews of The Bell Jar (1963) and subsequent essays, even one titled "An American Girlhood," do not mention a mother. At all! Instead they spotlight Buddy Willard, or Esther Greenwood's frequent references to babies. 

By 2003, Mrs. Greenwood looms very large:

In the novel The Bell Jar, Sylvia depicted her mother as a dominating, soul-destroying woman responsible for a good deal of the psychological pain that eventually led to Sylvia's suicide at the age of 30. [1]

The novel's text does not support such a reading. Re-reading shows Mrs. Greenwood's role in the novel is quite small.

Reviews and essays about Ariel's debut (1965, 1966) focus mostly on suicide and the poem "Daddy." Mom was such a bit player in this father-daughter drama that she is absent from the decade's Anglophone lit-crit except as a nameless factor in Sylvia's Electra complex. Critics didn't even know her name. M.L. Rosenthal in 1967 read The Colossus and wrote about the poem "The Disquieting Muses" as if it were about Sylvia's muses! In 2016 even the best of us firmly believed the same poem is "a fateful family romance" making it "easy to see what is wrong with Aurelia." [2]

My best efforts did not locate any "root." I saw instead faddish pop psychology expanding precisely alongside of Sylvia Plath's rise to fame. Sylvia in the 1950s knew Freudian theory was insubstantial but when troubled she returned to it, as to a faith, and in the 1960s put it in her novel. That fellow poets of the era wrote about their mental health problems and treatments made Sylvia Plath an ideal case study. Armchair analysis boils down to blaming mothers for whatever on the globe is wrong. Plath scholar Jacqueline Rose protested exactly this in her 2018 book Mothers (for example, governments blame mothers for having "too many children" or "not enough"). Yet Rose still manages to blame Aurelia Plath for quoting from Plath's "Three Women" lines other than the ones Rose thinks she should have.

The difference pop psychology has made between the 1960s and today is the difference between early Plath critics' dismay at the poem "Daddy"'s appropriation of the Holocaust and today's readers saying, "Sylvia's husband cheated on her and left her, and that was her personal holocaust. And her mother actually being there only made the breakup worse. Probably even caused it."

[1] Anita Gales, "What's My Motivation, Mom? Oh, It Must Be My Anger at You." New York Times, 7 September 2003, p. AR69.

[2] Pollack,Vivian. Our Emily Dickinsons. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Who Am I? Your Host Tells All

Paying my respects at the William S. Burroughs centennial, St. Louis.

I am Catherine Rankovic, living in Missouri USA within driving distance of the Lilly Library Plath archives and easy flying distance from Emory. In my twenties I lived in Boston, Massachusetts, wrote for newspapers and magazines, drank and vomited in Kenmore Square (a crowd was cheering me! That’s Boston!) and haunted Harvard Square bookstores. A friend and I, radical feminists, saw John Updike in Harvard Square and yelled after him, “We hate your books!”

 

How did you get interested in Sylvia Plath?

 

My high-school friend pinched her mother’s copy of The Bell Jar. I read that flirty Lois Ames endnote about Plath’s poetry and suicide. My Ariel paperback I inscribed with the date “6-10-74.”

 

That was a long time ago.

 

Back when typewriters made noise and telephones rang I read Plath books as they were published and watched Plath fandom and scholarship unfold. I published my first Plath article in 1982; where were you? But time and only time equipped me for the honor of doing Plath studies a service. Many thanks to those who crowd-funded the first days, in 2013, of my Aurelia Plath shorthand transcription project, encouraging my further inquiries and the creation of this online Aurelia biome.

 

What are your academic credentials?

 

B.A. Journalism, Marquette University; M.A. English Literature, Syracuse University; M.F.A. poetry, Washington University in St. Louis. I left Boston, age 29, for graduate studies that cost me nothing; both schools paid my way. Syracuse was stringent: huge reading loads and criticism about criticism and transcribing medieval manuscripts. Washington University paid my train ticket to visit the campus. My host Eric Pankey and I were in the department hallway when Howard Nemerov shuffled up, in blue felt bedroom slippers, saying, “Did you hear? Did you hear?” He had just been named U.S. Poet Laureate. I could drop you names galore. Derek Walcott quit needling me after I called him a tyrant. Diane Wood Middlebrook talked to me for three hours about her Anne Sexton biography. I studied with and interviewed for print all types of poets, fiction writers, and biographers. Thirteen interviews are collected in my (fourth) book, Meet Me: Writers in St. Louis. Sylvia’s favorites T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Sara Teasdale were all born in St. Louis. You can see here also Kate Chopin’s house and the Tennessee Williams Glass Menagerie Apartments.

 

How can we trust someone with no Ivy League ties or Ph.D.?

 

Assuming that one must be so certified, so tinselled, must belong to that club to write about Plath, who was kinda-sorta a member of that club although she decided it sucked, has left gaps and enormous blind spots in Plath scholarship. [1] Aurelia is one of those blind spots. It would still be that way were I not here.

 

What are your languages?

 

German, helpful with Plath studies if I keep it up. Rusty Russian but enough to tell a rare-books library that their manuscripts were not Marina Tsvetayeva’s. Gregg shorthand. My mother’s parents were Poles from Belarus. A clerk-typist, Mom had me trained as a secretary. Neither of my parents was college educated. Dad was Serbian. A blacksmith’s apprentice, he went to war and was a prisoner in Germany from 1941 to 1945. He arrived at Ellis Island in 1950 and worked in a foundry with other displaced persons, who became family friends. Dad was proud that his kids, all U.S.-born, got “real high educated.” But it was crucial that Mom was an American and employed outside the home.

Serbian refugees enjoying life in America, studio photograph. The drinks and food are studio props. My stepfather, top row, fourth from left.

 

Why do you focus on Aurelia Plath?

 

Aurelia has a place in Plath studies. I’m not sure of its magnitude; it will take more than one scholar to assess that. I understand that Sylvia is a career but Aurelia is not, so in the past 40 years there had been no incentive to probe: What did Aurelia do? Where did she study? Do Sylvia’s letters prove that theirs was a sick relationship? Did Aurelia really “never have much of a life”? Compared to whose? Why is it, when viewing a photo of Sylvia and her brother, that scholars see only Sylvia? What are the facts? Primary materials engage me most.

 

Do you love Aurelia?

 

No. She did her job. While admiring Sylvia’s writing and striving I also see she had every advantage available. I value objectivity. The unnoticed and unsaid intrigue me. Aurelia was the first to notice Sylvia’s talent and nurture it. Sylvia was Otto’s mini-me, a difficult daughter for Aurelia to raise. Yet theirs was an alliance, the most durable Sylvia had, and it worked.

 

Why don’t you emote more? Like, describe your deep feelings or how Sylvia’s handwriting looks like brass knuckles or how intensely you identify with Sylvia or dream about her?

 

Don’t I emote? I once dreamed I received a Sylvia Plath kit. All it contained was a pair of ears and a pair of eyes.

 

[1] No study has yet addressed Plath's anti-academic stance, as expressed in her letters of 1/29/57, 3/12/57, 11/5/57, and 11/28/57, for starters.

Beyond "Medusa" and "Mrs. Greenwood": From the Rosenstein Papers

Notes and tapes of 1970s interviews with Sylvia Plath’s friends, dates, and teachers, now in the Harriet Rosenstein research files at Emory University, are wonderfully valuable Plath resources, and include random comments and observations about Aurelia Plath. Interviewees such as Marcia Brown Stern or Elizabeth Compton Sigmund, whom Sylvia prepped to dislike Aurelia Plath before ever meeting her, had harsher things to say, but I sought first-hand impressions that went beyond “Mrs. Greenwood” and “Medusa”:

Marcia Brown Stern, Sylvia’s college friend: “Bitter and careworn” Aurelia was “struggling every minute of every day of every year to pay the bills and to keep herself together – just holding on for dear life – and there is no room for color – in her tone of voice or her hairdo or her aprons or her living room or inside her head.”

J. Melvin Woody, Sylvia’s date from Yale: Sylvia insisted he accompany her from New Haven to her Wellesley home “so she wouldn’t be with her mother alone. I found that a little hard to understand when I met Sylvia’s mother, who seemed harmless . . . . an intelligent, alert woman who was probably much better qualified to deal with a daughter like that than most women.”

Richard Sassoon, Sylvia’s boyfriend, met Aurelia once: “I remember her as sort of cold and academic and I suppose repressed. New England style.”

Pat O’Neill Pratson, Sylvia’s friend since tenth grade, a frequent visitor to the Wellesley house: Aurelia Plath served as a “bridge” between her own Austrian-immigrant parents and her Ivy-League children. Aurelia “recognized things she might like to have done that she saw the children doing in her place. It was very lonely for her.”

Peter Davison, Sylvia’s “summer romance” in 1955: Aurelia was “Terribly eager for her girl to get ahead. And very interested in someone [Davison] who worked for the Harvard University Press.”

Jon K. Rosenthal, one of Sylvia’s dates: Aurelia was “a very attractive woman at that time. Almost statuesque.”

Elizabeth Compton Sigmund, describing Aurelia visiting Devon in the summer of 1962: “And Mrs. Plath – ‘These are my grandchildren. You come to Grammy – Grammy will read it to you – Grammy will do it—’” 

Nancy Hunter Steiner, Sylvia’s college roommate: Aurelia was “sweet and well-meaning and very intimidated by Sylvia.”

Susan Weller Burch, Sylvia’s Smith classmate: Aurelia “just seemed to slip into the shadows.”. . . “gone at work most of the time. Grandparents in residence.”

Wilbury Crockett, Sylvia’s high-school English teacher: “Mrs. Plath was very much in control. I always had the feeling that she was very much aware of Sylvia’s gifts and considered Sylvia a precocious child. I think she was driven by the thought that Sylvia and Warren might not get all that they ought to have. Financial security was a very real factor.”

A Birthday Present for Aurelia

It's Aurelia Plath's 115th birthday (born April 26, 1906). Happy birthday, Sylvia's mom, and here is a present for you.

Hoping to write Sylvia Plath's biography, researcher Harriet Rosenstein on June 16, 1970, interviewed Sylvia's psychiatrist Dr. Ruth Barnhouse Beuscher, who treated Sylvia at McLean Hospital in 1953 and later. Among the first topics Rosenstein and Beuscher discussed was The Bell Jar as autobiography. Rosenstein took extensive notes, now in the Rosenstein Papers at Emory University. (How do I know what's in those papers? I went there in March 2020.)

Beuscher told Rosenstein The Bell Jar is factual, that what happened to its narrator Esther Greenwood happened to Sylvia, but some events were moved or altered. Fourth on the list:

"Esther's easy admission that she hated her mother [is] inaccurate. She [Sylvia] had spent at least the first month in the hospital asserting that she loved her mother. Beuscher says that she had to work hate admission out of Sylvia."

Aurelia, when Rosenstein interviewed you a few weeks later, in July, you blamed psychiatry for making Sylvia hate you. For the rest of your life you kept saying and writing that. Now we have Beuscher's word for what happened.

Beuscher by 1970 had become a Christian theologian like her father but was also deeply interested in the occult. She pursued a personal friendship with Rosenstein and entrusted to her the desperate letters Sylvia wrote to Beuscher in 1962 and 1963.

Otto Plath's Family Matrix

Ship's manifest listing immigrants Ernestine Plath and five of her six children, 1901

Here's rare information about Sylvia Plath's extended family on her father Otto's side. Otto Plath was the eldest of six children born to Ernestine and Theodor Plath, residents in the zone of  Prussia called Posen, ethnic Polish territory ruled by the German Empire from 1871 to 1919, when it became part of Poland. Otto had five siblings. From immigration papers, the U.S. Census, city directories, draft cards and other official documents we can learn about their lives. Of all her aunts and uncles, Sylvia met only her Aunt Frieda, briefly, on a 1959 trip to California. Here is the family:

 

Otto Emil Plath: April 13, 1885-Nov. 5, 1940. Ships' manifests show 15-year-old apprentice shoemaker/bootmaker Otto Plath, traveling in steerage, arriving in the U.S. on September 9, 1900, ahead of his father Theodor, a blacksmith who arrived in March 1901. In December 1901, through Canada, came Otto's mother Ernestine with Otto's five younger siblings, ages 3 to 13. They lived on an uncle's North Dakota homestead while Otto lived with Wisconsin relatives. In the 1905 Wisconsin state census, Otto is a boarder in Watertown, WI. Otto marries for the first time in Washington State in 1912. In 1920's federal census, Otto is a boarder in Berkeley, CA. In 1930, Otto, a boarder in Boston, for some reason shaved five years off his age. Otto Plath married Aurelia Schober in Carson City, Nevada, on January 4, 1932. Sylvia was born October 27, 1932. Otto died November 5, 1940, age 55, on the 22nd anniversary of his father Theodor's death.

 

Paul Plath: Dec. 20, 1886-Sept. 24, 1933. Paul in the 1910 census is named Paul "Platt" and is farming in Oregon with his father Theodor Platt (who'd entered the U.S. as "Plath"). Paul's brother Max "Platt" is a "hired man" for their neighbors. Wife and mother Ernestine is not listed in their household in 1910, and neither are the two Plath daughters, Martha and Frieda. Paul "Plath" in 1920 is a laborer in Washington State, and in 1930 a laborer boarding in Portland, Oregon. Paul could not have been born in December 1888 as papers sometimes claim, because his brother Max was born in February 1889. Paul in 1933 married his widowed landlady, Christina, a Russian 10 years his senior. Paul died later that same year, 1933, of pneumonia.

 

Max Theodor Plath: Feb. 15, 1889-Dec. 21, 1953. Max Plath took after his father and was a homesteader and mechanic, then became an inspector at a lumber mill. He moved frequently, living in 1910 with his father in Harney, Oregon, then shared a house with his mother until she was hospitalized in 1916. In 1920 Max lived in Saddle Butte, Oregon; in 1926 in Portland, in the early 1930s in Salem, in 1936 in Eugene, in 1946 in Cottage Grove. Max married Bertie in 1917, then Harriet in Stevenson, Washington, in 1935. The 1930 U.S. census said Max had two children, born in 1928 and 1930.

 

Hugo Fredericks Plath: Dec. 6, 1890-Aug. 17, 1974. Hugo kept the surname "Platt." Around 1911 he visited Canada, it seems on business. His draft card, signed in June 1917, says he both lived and worked at Standard Auto Supply in San Francisco. On that card Hugo asks exemption from the draft, saying his mother and father are his dependents. Hugo enlisted anyway on July 29, 1918, and served until December 23, 1918. The longest-lived of the siblings -- 83 years -- Hugo dwelt mostly in and around Los Angeles, at one point giving his occupation as "carpenter."

 

Martha Bertha Plath Johnson: Feb. 21, 1893-April 8, 1961. Theodor Plath in 1901 sent his wife Ernestine and his five younger children directly from Europe to Maza, North Dakota. As Martha's parents and brothers moved farther west, Martha seems to have stayed in Maza, and in 1910 at age 17 works as a "servant" for family there. At 19 Martha marries the town postmaster. She has two daughters, stays in Maza, and is buried, alongside her husband, near what is left of that town.

 

Frieda A. Plath Heinrichs: Mar. 15, 1897-Dec. 19, 1970. In the 1910 census, Frieda, age 13, is not living with her parents but rather is listed as "niece" of the Stapel family in Green Lake County, Wisconsin. Mrs. Stapel was Theodor Plath's sister. Frieda graduated from a Chicago nursing school. She visited her mother Ernestine in the Oregon state mental hospital in summer 1919; Ernestine died there September 28. In 1930 Frieda is a nurse in San Francisco, and by 1935 is married to physician Walter J. Heinrichs. They live in and around Los Angeles. In Letters Home, Aurelia S. Plath incorrectly gives Frieda Heinrichs' death date as 1966. California voter-registration rolls show both Walter and Frieda registered in 1966, but Frieda alone in 1968.

 

The seven Nix brothers in Sylvia Plath's children's book The It-Doesn't-Matter-Suit are named for her paternal relatives. The fictional seven are named Paul, Emil, Otto, Walter (the name of Sylvia's uncle by marriage), Hugo, Johann (the name of Sylvia's paternal great-grandfather), and the central character, Max. Written in 1959, the book was first published in 1996.

 

For sources or to make corrections, please contact me. Official papers and books aren't always right.

 

Theodor Plath lists his minor children on his naturalization papers, filed in North Dakota; Otto at age 22 is not a minor.

 

Aurelia Schober in the News, 1926-1932

During her college years in the 1920s, The Boston Herald daily newspaper, relying on press releases from the student Press Club at Boston University's College of Practical Arts and Letters, mentioned Aurelia Schober more often than one might imagine. It was not unusual for students to have so many extracurricular interests. The surprise is that Aurelia had such a high profile.

1926, May 25, p. 31: "B.U. Writers' Club Elects Officers" -- Aurelia Schober, elected Writers' Club vice-president, was also "president of the college German Club, and is well known for her ability in dramatic work."

1927, February 3, p. 28: "B.U. German Club to Present Play" -- "Miss Aurelia Schober of Winthrop has been assigned the leading part of Strubel in Sudermann's play "Die Ferne Prinzessin," to be produced by the German Club of the Boston University College of Practical Arts and letters Friday night, in place of Miss Emmi Koster of Hamburg, Ger., who is ill." [In this one-act comedy, "Strubel," a male poet, declares his hopeless love for a princess to a male who is actually the princess in disguise.]

1927, May 23, p. 4: "Who's Who in B.U. Yearbook" -- Under "Senior Honors" bestowed by peers at the College of Practical Arts and Letters, Aurelia Schober ranked third in the category "Busiest," second in the category "Most Studious," and first in the category "Class Dictionary."

1928, May 25, p. 3: "Miss Schober to give B.U. Class Valedictory" -- ["Class" means College of Practical Arts and Letters, class of 1928.] Besides being valedictorian, Miss Schober "was editor-in-chief of the junior yearbook, and has served as president of the German Club, and as a member of the student government board, the English Club, the Writers' Club, and Sigma." [Sigma was a scholastic society for seniors; according to the College's yearbook for 1929, page 44, Aurelia had been elected to that society as a junior, an honor granted to one student per year. Graduation day was June 6.]

1932, September 13, p. 13: "B.U. Alumni Directors Meet This Evening" -- "Mrs. Aurelia S. Plath, '28, Jamaica Plain" is listed as one of two women representing College of Practical Arts and Letters alumni. Mrs. Plath was then pregnant with Sylvia, to be born on October 27.

Aurelia Plath's Shorthand Transcriptions Have a Home

Aurelia Plath's shorthand annotations on the Lilly Library materials, cataloged and transcribed, are now available to all on the open-scholarship platform at Marquette University (my alma mater). The Excel files and short "keys" to each (PDFs) can be accessed and downloaded here. Take your time; there's a lot.

Marquette University Libraries digital librarian Heather James, herself a poet and Plath fan, welcomed the Aurelia Plath materials and skillfully uploaded the files. You must agree the Excel files are handsome and easy to use. Please credit Catherine Rankovic when referencing my work in your work. The Estate of Aurelia S. Plath granted me permission to release these transcriptions for scholarly purposes. Contact me at aureliascholar [at] gmail.com with questions re the shorthand.

Peter K. Steinberg kindly published a notice on his SylviaPlath.info blog that this project was ready.
 
I'm grateful that this project chose me. Currently I'm creating a chronology of Aurelia's life, gathering biographical information from every available source. It bears saying (because I've never heard it said) that Aurelia is an important key to Sylvia.

"Aurelia": What's in a Name?

In the periodic table of elements, "Au" stands for gold. The name "Aurelia" means "golden." It comes from the Latin adjective aureus, from the root word aurum: "gold." That in turn refers to the color yellow, specifically the color of the dawn; thus "Aurora," "goddess of the dawn, [who] renews herself every morning and flies across the sky, announcing the arrival of the sun," is a related name (Wikipedia). Julius Caesar's mother was named Aurelia. All accounts of her say she was respectable.

Aurelia Schober Plath, born in the U.S. in 1906, was the namesake of her own mother, Aurelia Grunwald (later Greenwood) Schober, born in Austria in 1887, when the name's popularity was near peaking in the U.S. according to census records. By 1906 the name was uncommon, ranking #496 in the Social Security Index tally of girls' names. It's trending upward in 2013, although it still isn't among the top 100 baby names.

Variants on the name Aurelia include Aurella, Auriel, and Aurielle.

Plath's volume Ariel (I'm using The Restored Edition here, but it's also true of the other edition) is stuffed with references to gold. Its first line says "Love set you going like a fat gold watch." Next page, "A ring of gold with the sun in it?" Then, "[i]n twenty-five years she'll be silver/ In fifty, gold." "The pure gold baby," "A gold filling," "my gold beaten skin/ Infinitely delicate," "gold-ruddy balls"-- you get it.

And of course if you've read about the poem "Medusa" you know "medusa" (Greek for "guardian or protectress") is a jellyfish grown to the familiar "dangling tentacles" stage, and that "Aurelia" is a genus of jellyfish, the most common kind, seen on the Atlantic beaches near Boston. Both Aurelia Plath and Sylvia knew that. Today we know there is a jellyfish discovered to be immortal.

"Aurelia Plath Had No Self"

From Salon.com, 2000, in an article called "The Real Sylvia Plath," by novelist Kate Moses:

"Aurelia Plath had no self; she lived for and through her children. From Sylvia Plath’s infancy, her primary parent’s selflessness gave Plath no model for a self that could maintain its autonomy or exist beyond meeting other people’s needs. What Plath had instead was one big boundariless, free-floating ego, a self utterly dependent on the inflation by the selfless parent, and all psychic roads, ultimately, led right back to Sylvia. Plath spent her entire adult life trying to trace the ego boundaries for herself that her mother neglected to impose."

Moses is a novelist, not a journalist. The novelist deals in fiction, the journalist in facts. Salon.com, as a journalistic venue, should have asked if Moses could prove her assertions that:

• Aurelia had no self?
• although Aurelia worked part-time from January 1941 to 1942, and full-time from 1942 to 1970, she lived for and through her children?
• she "gave Sylvia no model for a self that could maintain its autonomy or exist beyond meeting other people's needs"? (How can anyone ever know what what Aurelia didn't give?)
• Sylvia "spent her entire adult life trying to trace her ego boundaries"? That's obvious exaggeration. And when, precisely, did Sylvia's adulthood begin?

Aurelia and also Sylvia ('like an empty vessel") are treated in this article and others as if they were fictional characters who can be outfitted with motives and judged without facts. I call this "emo-scholarship." Hugh Kenner, contributor to Modern Critical Views: Sylvia Plath (1989), calls it "parlor psychiatry" (page 68).

Aurelia Plath and Shorthand's Evolution

The Gregg Shorthand Manual Simplified, second edition (1955) arrived in the mail today, and will be used to sharpen my shorthand transcription skills before I visit the Sylvia Plath archives at the University of Indiana. Aurelia Plath made shorthand and longhand annotations on her famous daughter’s letters and books. Although Plath scholars are many and avid, no scholar has ever transcribed the shorthand annotations. That is up to me and I accept the challenge.

The version of Gregg shorthand Aurelia learned depends on when she learned it, and that is not yet known. The first Gregg shorthand textbook, a pamphlet titled Light Line Phonography: The Phonetic Handwriting (1888) was published in England by John Robert Gregg in an edition of 500 copies, and in the U.S. in 1898 as a book, Gregg’s Shorthand Manual. Succeeding editions presented refinements—the 1929 edition is the most lauded—but the 1949 edition had a new title: Gregg Shorthand Manual Simplified. “Simplified” emphasized speed and accurate transcription. All earlier versions of Gregg shorthand are called “pre-Simplified.” The 1949 version would have appeared during Aurelia Plath's business-school teaching career, when she was 43.

I was taught from the eighth edition, called the Diamond Jubilee Series (1963-1977), edited to “make shorthand easier to learn.” Even so it wasn’t easy to learn: in high school I studied it for two years.

The Gregg shorthand versions Aurelia learned or taught await discovery. But last autumn in Sylvia’s archives I saw and read Aurelia’s annotations (they are of textbook quality) and think that they will be of interest when transcribed.

What The Bell Jar Says About Shorthand

I am taking an online refresher course in Gregg shorthand to prepare for my week in the Sylvia Plath archive, seeking and transcribing Aurelia Plath's shorthand notations on Sylvia's books and correspondence. I did Lesson 2 today. Gregg shorthand is a unique and graceful written language, with parallels to, and a learning curve similar to, cursive writing. But it'd be hard to convince two generations of Plath scholars that shorthand has any value, because Sylvia, in her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, wrote dismissively about it. Her stand-in character Esther Greenwood, age 19, decides against learning shorthand from her mother, a business-college teacher, during the lowest point of her young life, the summer of 1953.

For the record, The Bell Jar's mentions of shorthand are quoted here. Page numbers correspond to the Bantam paperback edition, published in the U.S. in 1972:

My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us ever since my father died. . . .She was always on to me to learn shorthand after college, so I'd have a practical skill as well as a college degree. [32]


I started adding up all the things I couldn't do.

I began with cooking. . . .

I didn't know shorthand either.

This meant I couldn't get a good job after college. My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand was something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter.

The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters. Besides, those little shorthand symbols in the book my mother showed me seemed just as bad as let t equal time and let s equal the total distance. [61-62]


My mother was teaching shorthand and typing to a lot of city college girls and wouldn't be home till the middle of the afternoon. [94]


By the end of supper my mother had convinced me I should study shorthand in the evenings. Then I would be killing two birds with one stone, writing a novel and learning something practical as well. I would also be saving a whole lot of money.

That same evening, my mother unearthed an old blackboard from the cellar and set it up on the breezeway. Then she stood at the blackboard and scribbled little curlicues in white chalk while I sat in a chair and watched.

At first I felt hopeful.

I thought I might learn shorthand in no time, and when the freckled lady in the Scholarships office asked me why I hadn't worked to earn money in July and August, the way you were supposed to if you were a scholarship girl, I could tell her I had taken a free shorthand course instead, so I could support myself right after college.

The only thing was, when I tried to picture myself in some job, briskly jotting down line after line of shorthand, my mind went blank. There wasn't one job I felt like doing where you used shorthand. And, as I sat there and watched, the white chalk curlicues blurred into senselessness.

I told my mother I had a terrible headache, and went to bed.

An hour later the door inched open, and as she crept into the room I heard the whisper of her clothes as she undressed. She climbed into bed. Then her breathing grew slow and regular.

In the dim light of the streetlamp that filtered through the drawn blinds, I could see the pin curls on her head glittering like a row of little bayonets.

I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it. [99-100].


I thought I'd better go to work for a year and think things over. Maybe I could study the eighteenth century in secret.

But I didn't know shorthand, so what could I do?

I could be a waitress or a typist.

But I couldn't stand the idea of being either one. [103]