Bringing Up Baby Sylvia

October 1932 issue

“I was totally imbued with the desire to be a good mother,” said Aurelia Plath, and a pink satin Baby Book now in the Sylvia Plath archives at the Lilly Library shows full-time new mother Aurelia recording joyfully on its pages her infant Sylvia's every gain.

 

Baby Books emerge in the U.S. around 1880. They require literacy and leisure and parents who expected children to grow up; in 1900, that’s three children out of four. Mass-produced baby books reached peak popularity around the time Sylvia was born in 1932. Among the mothers of the twenties and thirties faithfully tracking in writing their children’s progress was Rose Kennedy, inspired by The Care and Feeding of Children (1894), a bestseller by a New York hospital pediatrician who made patient “charts” mandatory after seeing nurses keeping them.

 

Intensified scientific interest in child rearing—the phrase “child care” first appears in 1915—designated “early childhood” the most critical phase. Writing in baby books (kept almost exclusively for firstborns!) made new middle-class mothers feel scientific but anxious, and therefore willing to pay for expert advice. Aurelia subscribed before Sylvia’s birth to Parents’ magazine.

 

Most fatefully for Sylvia, Parents’ in the 1930s mainstreamed in the U.S. the quite novel idea that the goal of education was for children to be happy. Aurelia, like her contemporaries, was raised “to be good,” meaning “to bow to authority.” “Happiness” was incidental; the root of “happy” means “good fortune,” and no parent can guarantee happiness. That churchmouse Aurelia was an ultra-modern mother, raising her children “to be happy” starting with feedings on demand and continuing along the lines set out by Friedrich Froebel, founder of “kindergarten.” He said children should have creative toys, sing and read and hear stories, be reasoned with, and follow their own interests.

A modern Baby Book, 2023 ($27).

 

But it seems that after the kindergarten stage Aurelia imposed happiness as a household norm. Sylvia learned to hate it when Aurelia kept repeating that she only wanted her children to be happy.

 

Sylvia Plath as a mother consulted the manual Baby and Child Care (1946), which moved the child-rearing goalposts: It said the goal was to make children feel loved. Sylvia was rarely happy and did not feel loved, and Aurelia, “good” by any lights but her daughter’s, met the same fate.

 

[1] Founded in 1922, Parents ceased publishing its print edition in 2022.

Translation of Sylvia Plath's German Essay

Sylvia Plath wrote this essay for her Smith College course "Deutsche 12," and the typescript carbon, in German, titled "Wie Ich Einmal Kleinen Bruder Neckte" is in the Lilly Library's Plath mss. II, Box 8, folder 19, "Prose-fiction." I would call it nonfiction. Because I have never seen a translation or even a discussion of this essay, here it is in English:

How I Once Teased Little Brother

 

It was in 1938. Autumn had come and the sky was blue and clear, the sun glowed like a diamond, and the little leaves were very colorful. Afternoons I hopped joyfully on my way home. I thought the whole world was a wonder, in my first year of elementary school.

 

My little brother, who was too young to attend elementary school, was very jealous. Every day I bragged that I could read and write, and my father and my mother were very proud of me.

 

My little brother stayed silent. Finally he said, in a clear, loud voice: “I don’t go to school; I do something better! I live every night on the other side of the moon. . .”

 

My father and my mother now listened to the inventive story my little brother told. Now I was the silent and jealous one. He was too smart for me.

Plath enrolled in this intermediate-level German course in her senior year, spring 1955, then dropped it to better prepare for her comprehensive exams (letter to Aurelia Plath, 25 April 1955). Aurelia Plath mentions in her preface to Letters Home young Warren ("little brother") Plath's "Other Side of the Moon" adventure tales, spun when he was two and a half years old.

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.