Leaving 26 Elmwood Road

In 1983, six years after selling Sylvia’s letters and juvenilia, Aurelia Plath at 26 Elmwood Road in Wellesley still had “oceans of papers, out-of-print magazines, clippings of reviews, letters”; “dozens of boxes of family pictures; my notebooks (travel, journals)”; “four three-drawer filing cabinets, three desks, an eight-drawer bureau of papers.” While paging through these, she uncovered yet more. [1]

Age 77, after 40 years in that house Aurelia had to sell it and move to an apartment. She wanted the papers by and about Sylvia to go to the Sylvia Plath archive at Smith College’s library—donated, to get a tax break. Yet the prospect of sorting them was overwhelming.

That summer she told this to Wellesley neighbor and friend Dr. Richard Larschan, who volunteered his help. I asked Dr. Larschan where in the house Aurelia had kept all the papers and memorabilia so vital to Plath studies now.

“I only know that when we were sorting, Aurelia kept it in two walk-in closets in the room where her parents had slept,” he remembered. Self-described “pack rat” Aurelia “kept everything she touched in meticulous order—hundreds of letters neatly organized according to correspondent, and tied with ribbons.”

A U-Mass. professor of English (now Emeritus), Larschan was the right helper for sifting the goods systematically. He said they met “thrice-weekly [for] two- or three-hour sessions, during which Aurelia and I would evaluate the accumulation of 60-plus years, including things from Sylvia’s childhood like the letter opener she had carved, Sylvia’s Girl Scout uniform, Otto’s doctoral certificate, multiple copies of every newspaper clipping and magazine article Sylvia ever published, hundreds and hundreds of letters from readers of Letters Home, et cetera. I would type a list of things Aurelia would either discard, give to me, or donate to Smith and Indiana University after being evaluated by a rare-book expert.”

This task drained Aurelia emotionally. She wrote a friend, “Have to part with most reminders of my past—it hurts, as you know. (Eyestrain slows me down.)” Not only did her eyes hurt, but “Discarding thousands of pages of correspondence tugs at the heart. So many good people have given of themselves!” She means they threw away the fan letters. On the good side, Larschan and Aurelia developed a bond. Like Sylvia, he had had been a Fulbright fellow. At Exeter University in 1962-63 he had lived only fifteen miles from Ted and Sylvia’s Court Green, although they never met. Larschan admired Aurelia’s independence (“a burden to nobody”) while acknowledging her sometimes cloying sentimentality, rather like his own mother’s.

Sentimentality is of course repellent, but the next time you marvel over the rich resources in Plath archives, thank Sylvia’s sentimental mother.

Smith College received the donation in December 1983. Still, not every notable piece of paper went there. “In 1984,” Larschan said, “Aurelia gave me her correspondence with Olwyn Hughes about publishing (or NOT publishing!) The Bell Jar, which I sold to Smith College. She also gave me duplicate copies of Sylvia’s various publications that I sold privately and are now housed at Emory—along with [Sylvia’s] downstairs neighbor Trevor Thomas’s [self-published memoir] Last Encounters, inscribed to me when I lived in England."

Also withheld from the archives were Aurelia's own notebooks and journals, and photos of family members besides Otto or Sylvia: maybe of sister Dottie or son Warren, and so on. Asked if he saw any packets of Aurelia’s letters to Sylvia, Larschan said he did not.

So the task was completed. “When we were through cataloging and evaluating the materials Aurelia donated to Smith, in 1984 [Smith College] President Jill Ker Conway invited Aurelia and me for lunch, and so I drove us to Northampton,” Larschan said. [2] That lunch was their thank-you.

 

[1] ASP to Mary Ann Montgomery, letters of April 1980 and September 6, 1983, Lilly. ASP to Rose Leiman Goldemberg, postcards June and October 1983, Rose Goldemberg Papers, *T-Mss 2016-003, box 8, folder 1, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

[2] Emails, Richard Larschan to the author, December 2 and 4, 2021.

The Only Aurelia Tape at Emory: A Guide to Digital File v7b4x

Taped recordings now digitized and held by Emory University Libraries’ Special Collections preserve the words of about 60 interviewees who in the 1970s told researcher Harriet Rosenstein what they knew about Sylvia Plath. Aurelia Plath’s voice is on only one recording, at the tail end of the digital file named v7b4x. Abruptly, at 38:15, Aurelia is heard in mid-sentence speaking about Sylvia, and is about to take questions from an audience.

 

A friend brought Rosenstein this partial, undated and often inaudible audio cassette, and the pair listened for 16 minutes, taping its contents and chafing while Aurelia says only what they already know: about Sylvia’s second novel of “adventure, joy, and romance,” burnt in summer 1962; that Sylvia never wanted her novel The Bell Jar published in the U.S.; the composite nature of its characters, such as Mrs. Greenwood (“the character that’s made my life miserable,” Aurelia says, and explains why). Early on, the pair begin to complain, mock Aurelia, and laugh at her taped remarks. Exasperated (“For Christ’s sake! She just goes on, huh?”), they halt Aurelia’s tape at 54:05 and discuss it, then shut off their own tape recorder at 54:29.

To be fair, the two listeners are no more pitiless than any other two high-literates who verbally skewer lesser people for sport. They are, after all, critics. Here's a brief partial transcript; listen in. Aurelia speaks about Letters Home, published in November 1975, so the date of the talk might be March 16, 1976, when Aurelia spoke at the Wellesley Club. The blanks represent inaudible words or phrases.

 

Aurelia: And for those of you who haven’t read it [Letters Home], it starts off with her entering Smith as a freshman, with all the fears and all the hopes of a freshman student.

Listener 1: (sarcastic) A normal, solid, American freshman girl.

Aurelia: ____________ of the fall, and it also takes the time of her experiences at Mademoiselle and her junior year, goes right straight through to _______________.

Listener 1: (sighs) Oh matter.

Aurelia: And she wrote a letter to a friend of hers, whom I refer to as “E” in the book, to protect the person—

Listener 1: From what?

Aurelia: describing her reaction, her own evaluation of the whole experience of her breakdowns. And that’s _________. And then a mother of a son who knew her well, was going through a depression, had written me asking my advice about how to handle a child who was suffering a depression, and I sent that letter over to Sylvia, who was at that time happily married, and asked her to write

Listener 1: She wasn’t “married,” see; she was “happily married.”

Listener 2: You betcha.

Listener 1: You understand?

Listener 2: You betcha.

Listener 1: It’s a whole other category!

 

I transcribed this recording because I too hoped it would reveal more about the Plaths, but instead it reveals part of a process of diminishment and erasure.

How Much Money Did Aurelia Plath Make From Sylvia's Work?

Aurelia Plath taught at Boston University for 29 years but never made much money. Paying for Sylvia's needs and wants, and, after Sylvia's death, annual visits to the motherless grandchildren in England, smoked Aurelia's accounts down to their filter. Boston University forcibly retired employees at age 65, so a year before that, in 1970, Aurelia found another job teaching secretarial skills at Cape Cod Community College, 80 miles from Wellesley, where she could teach full-time until age 70. She was too old to enroll in its pension program, but without the job she'd have no income. [1]

What, didn't Aurelia ever get any money for being Sylvia Plath's mother?

Sylvia died without writing a will, so her husband Ted Hughes inherited Sylvia's bank accounts and property, valued shortly after Sylvia's death in 1963 at 2,147 English pounds. Hughes phoned Aurelia saying he was willing to return to Aurelia and to Sylvia's Aunt Dottie and to Olive Higgins Prouty the cash they gave Sylvia during her final desperate months. Aurelia told him, "Keep it for the children." Hughes also by default owned the copyrights to all of Sylvia's writings, the most valuable asset in Sylvia's estate. He assigned his sister Olwyn the job of managing these rights.

Aurelia had other assets, in 1963 worthless except to a sentimental mother. Sylvia had told Aurelia to throw out or use for scrap the accumulated junque of Sylvia's childhood and youth: letters from camp, early manuscripts, schoolwork, artwork, childhood diaries, paper dolls, and Sylvia's long ponytail, to name a few. Sylvia left these items with her mother when Sylvia settled in England. The material was destined to balloon in value after Aurelia's worst nightmares came true.

Appalled after reading The Bell Jar, published only in England, Aurelia refused to allow Ted and Olwyn Hughes to sell it to a U.S. publisher. Olwyn nagged Aurelia for three years. In 1970 Aurelia gave in, but demanded and won in exchange the right to edit and publish a volume of Sylvia's letters to her family. Aurelia owned the letters, but Sylvia's estate owned what was written on them. The deal was made, with hard feelings all around.

There is some evidence that Aurelia was to receive from publishers Harper & Row a percentage of royalties from Sylvia's books Crossing the Water or Winter Trees (both 1971) or even The Bell Jar, but the checks were so small they disgusted her.

Aurelia quit Cape Cod Community College to edit Sylvia's letters for Letters Home, receiving from publishers Harper & Row a $5,000 cash advance. [2] Aurelia immediately spent $2,400 for new siding for the house in Wellesley, and for two years worked at editing and typing the Letters Home manuscript, published in 1975.

In March 1977, with the money from Letters Home dwindling, Aurelia sold the bulk of her stored material, including the original letters from Sylvia to her family. A broker sold them to Indiana University's Lilly Library for a sum kept secret. Aurelia received payment in installments. (Why Indiana? The Lilly Library already owned Plath manuscripts a London bookseller had purchased from Sylvia Plath in 1961.) Aurelia also sold items the Lilly Library later purchased and added to its now-resplendent Sylvia Plath archives, where pack-rat Aurelia's storehouse of Sylvia's junque is today so valuable one must wear gloves to handle it.

Aurelia felt comfortable enough to vacation in Antigua in 1978 and 1979. Aurelia told a correspondent in 1979 that she received no money from her daughter's writing with the exception of Letters Home [3] and, without mentioning the Lilly Library, said she had "eked out" a few years of living on Sylvia's name, hoping she wouldn't outlive that money. In 1988 Aurelia told Elizabeth Compton Sigmund she was receiving interest income from the sale of the letters. [4] A 1979 play based on Letters Home paid Aurelia $750, half of the profit from its New York run. [5] A later production netted her $291.63. 

In 1980 Aurelia wrote that she still wore some of Sylvia's clothes. [6] Before selling the Wellesley house and furniture and moving to an apartment in the North Hill retirement complex, Aurelia in December 1983 donated books and papers to Smith College's Plath collection. These included Aurelia's own Sylvia-related papers and family documents, and letters and clippings about the effect of Sylvia's life and death on her family and friends. This got Aurelia a tax break that year when she sold her house.

In exchange for all of a resident's funds, North Hill agreed to house and care for residents, as needed, until they died. [7] This sounded to Aurelia like a good deal. Aurelia died at North Hill, of Alzheimer's disease, in 1994.

[1] ASP to TH, 11 March 1973, Emory.

[2] Journal of Mary Clarke, 11 October 1973, Smith College. There is evidence that Olwyn Hughes opposed the $5,000 advance going to Aurelia.

[3] ASP to Mary Ann Montgomery, 30 January 1979, Lilly.

[4] Elizabeth Compton Sigmund phone interview with ASP,  February 1988, Smith.

[5] ASP to Montgomery, 23 November 1979.

[6] ASP to Montgomery, 25 June 1980.

[7] ASP to Carol Hughes, 17 May 1983, Emory.