Top Research Posts of 2022

August 16, 2022: First Known Photo of Otto Plath's parents

July 12: Four Generations of Pop-Up Weddings

June 7: Digitized video footage of Aurelia Plath, permission of Dr. Richard Larschan

April 12: Photo of Otto Plath's first wife and his in-laws

MOST POPULAR POST: January 25, "Otto Plath Was a Pacifist, Not"

PERSONAL FAVES: April 26, Aurelia Schober's college days reconstructed from day planners purchased from eBay; April 19, reviewed the 1986 French-language film of Letters Home, directed by Chantal Akerman

In 2022 this blog had 35 posts. Coming in 2023: "The Lost Lines of 'Eavesdropper,'" and much more.

In March 2022 I chaired a session for "Sylvia Plath Across the Century" and over the conference's two-day span heard many inspiring presentations. In April, I researched recordings and Linda Wagner-Martin's files at the Lilly Library; in July translated Sylvia's German essay into English. In late April, a first and a landmark: The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath was published, with my essay introducing Aurelia's shorthand annotations. In June, transcribed for Dr. Gary Leisig Aurelia's shorthand marginalia on Sylvia's published poems. In October, attended via Zoom definitive sessions of the Sylvia Plath Literary Festival in Hebden Bridge, U.K. In November, consulted with a British author on her draft of Mothers of the Mind, a forthcoming study of the mothers of Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and Agatha Christie. A personal fave: Dr. Amanda Golden at the Woodberry Poetry Room discussing Sylvia Plath's use of pink paper (March 8, 2022; on YouTube here).

A thrilling year in Plath World! As always, English transcriptions of the shorthand on Sylvia Plath's papers can be downloaded from this site at Marquette.edu and viewed.

The First-Ever Aurelia Panel

The Sylvia Plath Conference at Ulster University hosted an unprecedented "Aurelia panel," titled "'Old Barnacled Umbilicus': Considering Aurelia Plath." I was delighted to have as co-panelists Dr. Adrianne Kalfopoulou of The American College of Greece, and Dr. Janet Badia, of Indiana University-Purdue University. "Panel on Aurelia is on fire!" said a tweet from our audience as we knocked it out of the park. Some other comments: "Jaw hit the floor." "Mic drop."

Cathleen Allyn Conway chaired a thrilling 90 minutes that acknowledged that Sylvia Plath had a mother, or shall we say a parent, who introduced her to poetry and helped shape her voice, as Dr. Kalfopoulou described in her paper, "Witches in the Gingerbread: The Making of the Plathian Voice." After Dr. Badia presented "'There is nothing between us': Mother-Daughter Intimacy in the Plath Archive," there can be no question Aurelia was Plath's first and most important poetry critic. During her formation and as an adult, Plath sent her mother sheaves of poems, requesting feedback.

I'm not saying Plath loved or used all her mother offered. We don't know, right now, what her mother offered. Plath burned her mother's letters. Like any daughter Plath worked against her mother's influence as much as with it. But you can't do either without first having a mother who has influence.

Bolstered by the new Volume One of Plath's complete letters, most of them to Aurelia and her family, the Aurelia panel provided Plath biographical scholarship with much-needed corrective lenses. We have liked to believe with the Romantics that artists create themselves and their work independent of their contexts, cultures and families. But those provide the support and friction that help a born artist become a consummate and pathbreaking artist.

"Medusa's Metadata" - Plath Conference Paper

Nearly 700 letters from Sylvia Plath to her mother, Mrs. Aurelia Schober Plath, are held in the Sylvia Plath mss. II files at the University of Indiana’s Lilly Library. Mrs. Plath, a professional instructor of Gregg shorthand, wrote on these letters and their envelopes scores of comments and notes to herself and to posterity. One hundred fifty-nine annotations in the Plath mss. II correspondence are in in Gregg shorthand. Never before cataloged or transcribed, the shorthand annotations on Plath’s letters, labeled “unreadable” and ignored, provide new metadata about Plath—who rather famously never learned shorthand—and her uneasy relationship with her only surviving parent and provider.

The transcriptions include Mrs. Plath’s most urgent and personal responses to her daughter’s needs, marriage, suicide, and posthumous fame; bitter negotiations with Ted Hughes over the U.S. publication of The Bell Jar; and detail Mrs. Plath’s role as curator of her daughter’s correspondence: with friends (“Share with Gordon if the time is right,” 30 August 1954), family (“Do not let Mother [Granny] see this!” 2 February 1956) and ultimately the public (Letters Home, 1975). That role does not end with the publication of two volumes of The Complete Letters of Sylvia Plath. In fact, Mrs. Plath is that collection's first cause.

Plath Conference in Belfast in November 2017

I completed the Aurelia Plath shorthand project in February; it had taken another trip to Bloomington's Lilly Library, last September, to double-check all the correspondence in the Plath mss. II Boxes 1 through 6a.

On April 15, Mrs. Plath's estate granted me permission to use the findings for scholarship. Now I feel completely free to write. November's Sylvia Plath Conference in Belfast will coincide with the publication of The Complete Letters of Sylvia Plath and I will be presenting a paper there about Mrs. Plath's shorthand annotations, which I call "metadata," on said correspondence.

Conference information: Sylvia Plath Conference: Words, Letters and Fragments, at Ulster University, Belfast, November 10-11, 2017. Website here. Twitter: @plathconference. There's also a Facebook page.