Why an Aurelia Plath Biography is Impossible (For Now)

Analyze the appeal to young women of this creative collage-style ad (1957)

Here's what's derailed my longtime goal to write a book-length Aurelia Plath biography in the classic birth-to-death mode:

-Insufficient material. After ten years I find Aurelia's childhood a blank except for what she tells in Letters Home. Hundreds of Aurelia's letters to Sylvia are missing. I'll wager that Aurelia withheld from archives and filed away some crucial letters and writings, hers and Sylvia's, and they're privately owned. Aurelia kept diaries or journals, she said so, but they'd look anemic alongside of Sylvia's. Aurelia's associates and friends didn't write and publish memoirs.

-Aurelia was a polite, generous, hard-working lady and caring mother and neighbor who did her best. I found in her life some exciting episodes and prefigurements and secrets, yet the lives of unglamorous people who never wrote poems or held office lack drama and are unlikely to sell.

-Lack of funds. I've funded most of my own research because I think it's worth it, but don't want in my lap a multi-year book project without a sponsor or publisher's backing. Lucky you if you have a working spouse.

-Permissions. I asked the distinguished Plath biographer Dr. Heather Clark about the hardest thing she faced while writing Red Comet, and she said "Permissions." What was difficult for Dr. Clark would drive an independent scholar insane.

-Shifting perspectives. Increasingly I'm viewing Aurelia and Sylvia Plath less in terms of their personal trivia and more in the context of the cards they were dealt and the forces acting on and against them. I'm thinking that they maintained their bond -- incomprehensible to most -- because they needed it.

I'll think of alternatives!

"The Passing Dazzle of Each Face"

Eternal vigilance is the price of more context for Sylvia Plath and her mother Aurelia Schober Plath. In March came up for sale a set of college yearbooks for 1926, 1927, and 1928, for the college Aurelia attended, the years she was there, and I bought them. Yes, Aurelia Plath went to college. Her college yearbook was called the Sivad.

Although not Aurelia's personal copies, Aurelia inscribed in them personal notes to owner Muriel Brigham, fellow 1928 graduate of Boston University's College of Practical Arts and Letters, called by its students "P.A.L." Muriel Brigham (1898-1983) majored in English. She and Aurelia were both members of the college's Writers Club.

The 1928 Sivad -- Aurelia Schober, editor-in-chief -- is scarce and insanely priced when auctioned. A blurry, faulty scan costs $99; I would not pay that. I secured all three yearbooks for less. Star and valedictorian of her class, Aurelia appears in each volume. How instructive to see Aurelia's face among those of a few hundred of her peers (sadly, none interviewed while it was possible) and good photos of the campus and dorm rooms as she knew them. I learned that not only Aurelia but some classmates staffed Camp Maqua in Maine in summer 1927 -- when Aurelia invited her 43-year-old boyfriend for a week and sneaked around. Will present Aurelia's inscriptions next week.

The yearbook had to go to press in early spring, so Aurelia's late-spring honors are published in the 1929 Sivad, in which Aurelia is called "Daughter of the Dawn." Think you that I am joking? Here it is:

The Junior year in many ways was the most active of the lot, filled as it was with college work, a wonderful SIVAD and a Prom that has glittered as only Betelgeuse has glittered on the shoulder of Orion. In the midst of this radiance that Daughter of the Dawn, Aurelia Schober, shone as editor-in-chief of SIVAD, adding many new features . . .

I'm seeking a copy of Aurelia Schober's 1928 valedictory speech, delivered June 6, 1928. Do you know where I can find it? It's not in the yearbooks or the Winthrop, Mass. newspapers.

Pushed Off the School Bus

School bus, 1918

Aurelia Plath's preface to Letters Home sets her "early childhood" in a "primarily Irish-Italian neighborhood in Winthrop, Massachusetts during World War I." She remembered those schoolmates jeering her for speaking only German, and during the war they called Aurelia "Spy-face" and once pushed her down the school bus steps and left her sprawling, while the bus driver looked the other way.

Yet Aurelia lived from birth in 1906 until she was 12 not by the sea in Winthrop but in the Boston neighborhood Jamaica Plain. There she first went to school and was promoted from first grade to third. The Schobers moved in 1918 to Shirley Street in Winthrop, their neighbors almost all Anglos. "Schober" was most non-Anglo name on the block. [1] Census records show that the Irish and Italian schoolmates Aurelia placed in Winthrop were in Jamaica Plain. If she was assaulted in Winthrop it was by Anglos.

Few with German names or heritage escaped pan-Germanic harassment during World War I -- scholar Otto Plath in California got grilled by the FBI -- and given Aurelia's tendency to sugarcoat, it was probably worse than Aurelia said. Sylvia wrote that Aurelia was stoned for speaking German. One of Sylvia's fictional mothers dreads a second war with Germany not because it's war but because she remembers the U.S. during World War I.

Because Aurelia's narrative of her childhood is unreliable -- so many forces were at work on her as she was writing it -- and there is no other source, I wondered if I ought to try to believe the school bus incident happened in Winthrop, if Winthrop even had a school bus in 1918.

It turns out Winthrop had a Shirley Street school bus as early as 1910.

Caption says "About 1910. 'School Bus' of those days on Shirley Street . . . Girl in gingham dress inside right rear 'bus' is Evelyn Floyd Clark."

Evelyn Floyd is listed with Winthrop High graduating class of 1913, with 165 graduates, mostly with Anglo surnames such as Floyd and Clark. There are some Irish and Jewish surnames. Only one graduate has an Italian surname (Monafo). That was Winthrop before the Schobers moved in.

Aurelia Schober graduated from Winthrop High School in 1924. There were 146 graduates. They had Anglo, Irish, Jewish, and a sprinkling of Germanic surnames. Only one graduate had an Italian surname (Carro). That was Aurelia's Winthrop, with a school bus more like the enclosed one at the top of this post.

Aurelia's letters to her many correspondents do not give more details about her childhood. Nor do the archives she assembled that she made publicly available. By contrast Aurelia saved everything about her daughter Sylvia Plath's childhood. In the Letters Home preface Aurelia moved on from a brief discussion of her childhood to describe what she liked to read. I'm reminded of what Sylvia wrote her mother from summer camp in 1949: "Tell me something personal in your postcards. I don't care about book reviews as much as you and the family."

[1] 1920 United States Federal Census, Massachusetts, Suffolk, Winthrop, District 0676, p. 49.

Top-Rated Plath Research Posts of 2023

Studious me with manual typewriter, junior year

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Diary of an Aurelia Plath Researcher (May 16) Thank you for your interest in what I'd tell you privately.

Aurelia and Sylvia Plath Had Black Cousins (November 14) The most emotional, heart-pounding research I've ever done.

How Did Aurelia Plath Control and Manipulate Sylvia? (July 18) They sadly underestimated Sylvia.

Books About Sylvia Plath That I Hate to Love (July 11) This was fun to write.

Top Research Posts

Sylvia Plath's Hungarian Roots (September 26) Genealogy proves Sylvia Plath was not a Jew.

Aurelia and Sylvia Plath Had Black Cousins (November 14) An inconvenient truth.

Diary of an Aurelia Plath Researcher (May 16) First interview with one of Aurelia's former students.

Hype: The Sales Numbers of Ariel (February 7) Neglected business papers shatter a 50-year-old fantasy.

Personal Favorites

Aurelia Goes to a Poetry Reading (June 27) A Cape Cod archivist's help plus research revealed an Aurelia facet totally new.

Prussia: What Does It Mean? (September 19) I am proud of having condensed thick dusty histories of Prussia into an easy "Prussia for Plath fans" post.

There were 48 weekly posts in 2023, my tenth year of posting. It's having the effect I wanted. Thank you for being so interested in Sylvia Plath's world that you want to know more. There is more.

       -Your researcher,

          Catherine

On Sylvia's Ugliest Clothes

New York City, June 1953

Sylvia Plath wore some very unflattering things, and besides photos of her in swimsuits, only the wool-coat-and-knee-socks photo taken by Jane Baltzell at Newnham College shows Sylvia wearing her clothes with panache. "Panache" originally meant "ornamental feathers on a helmet." It came to mean "with confidence," that one looks as good as one feels. And Sylvia's readers know Sylvia rarely felt good.

"Chic," meaning elegant or sophisticated, Sylvia never was. The "May Week" clothes Sylvia modeled while at Newnham don't suit her. They don't even fit. The suit and hat worn at Mademoiselle in June 1953 looks "put-together," but without "flair" (meaning "originality"). They are someone else's idea of put-together. Sylvia in her ugliest Mademoiselle photo, with the rose [above], was either about to cry her eyes out or had just finished doing so, The Bell Jar says, and the Peter Pan collar on the dress could not have helped.

Cape Cod, 1957

Eliminated from "ugliest clothes" consideration are things Sylvia did not choose for herself (such as in childhood) or expect to be photographed in (bathrobe, gym suit). Sylvia sported her coolie hat on her Aurelia-paid-for-it seven-week honeymoon on the Cape, where both Sylvia and husband Ted Hughes were miserable.

Smith College, Nov. 1954

Aurelia Plath wore some awful clothes too, but as signifiers her clothes operate differently. (An "Aurelia's Ugliest Clothes" post is forthcoming.) Sylvia's sense of style -- as well as her sense of how life should be lived -- came from glossy magazines, so never would she reach the perfection she longed for, because even name-brand clothing and following Look Books to the letter cannot render anyone stylish. Fashion is not style. Bermuda shorts with wool sweaters were the fashion for 1950s college girls. In no other outfit did Sylvia Plath look so two-dimensional. This was one of the happier times in her life.

Rome, April 1956

Sylvia was taller than average, and former classmates remember that Sylvia often slumped, as in the color photo taken in Rome. Her polka-dotted hairband recalls not Brigitte Bardot but Rosie the Riveter. She wore it in Venice to ride a gondola, clutching her brown handbag and hating her travel-mate Gordon Lameyer every minute of their trip.

When Sylvia and Ted married and Aurelia wanted "wedding" photos to show relatives and friends, for spite the couple sent spiritless studio photos with Sylvia wearing what I fear is the "pink knitted dress" she appropriated from Aurelia and had been married in. 

Emphatically not a wedding dress, in the photos its top appears stretched out and the worse for wear. Sylvia had described Aurelia's item as a "suit," so maybe the photo shows a mere sweater. In that case it means not only "buzz off, Mom" but "send money."

Some photos of Sylvia (1950, 1962) show oversized skirt suits she might have hoped to "grow into," vertically, horizontally, or otherwise. I had mercy and do not show them here. I think that like all new clothes, they signified expectations. When I buy clothes a size up, it means I want more power in my life. 

1956

As much as it's said "Sylvia loved clothes," it is our good fortune that she valued other things more highly.