I read somewhere that Sylvia Plath really stuck it to her mother by announcing, the day Aurelia got off the boat, that she and Ted Hughes (who was there) were getting married in three days: as if triumphantly quashing her mother's dream of a tame and crew-cut son-in-law. Didn't agree then, thinking Sylvia might have been too ecstatic to be mean, but I agree now because I found a pattern of defiant little weddings in her family. Four generations:
- Sylvia's "Grammy" and "Grampy," Aurelia Greenwood and Frank Schober, defying her father, got their marriage license July 3, 1905, the day the bride turned 18 and did not need parental permission. They wed as soon as legally possible: Monday, July 10 at Boston's Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help.
- Otto Plath in a Nevada courthouse really stuck it to his estranged and hated first wife with a quick-and-dirty divorce-mill divorce and by marrying Aurelia Schober on the spot the same day: January 4, 1932.
- Aurelia's daughter Sylvia Plath with Ted Hughes told her mother, arrived in London for a visit on June 13, 1956, that they were marrying June 16. Aurelia puked up her dinner that night. She was the couple's only guest at St. George the Martyr church in London. (Glimpse its inside, in the church's promotional video.)
- Fast-forward to 1979, when Sylvia's daughter Frieda Hughes, "now 'engaged,' will be 19 on April 1," Aurelia Plath wrote a penpal, as if "engaged" was her granddaughter's teenage daydream, and maybe forgetting her own mother married at 18. But Frieda at 19 married a farmhand. It was a rebellious marriage and short. Ted moaned in a letter to a friend that his daughter was divorced at 23.