Aurelia Plath's Importance

Sylvia Plath and Aurelia Plath were a team, one of literature's most successful teams.

Sylvia Plath in 1946 was a fatherless Girl Scout from Wellesley. Sylvia in 1955 was a Smith College graduate with poems published in Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, and The Nation – top showcases of American poetry -- and a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge, England. She was not yet 23 years old. 

This was before Sylvia met Ted Hughes and 15 years after her father’s death. With no man's support, only her mother's support for her talent and drive, Sylvia Plath cracked barriers of sex and class that were intended to dissuade fatherless suburban Girl Scouts from aiming for literary immortality.

Patriarchy has ignored the women's alliance, as if Sylvia achieved what she did on her own. Or its agents appoint for Sylvia a different ally: Ted Hughes, or Al Alvarez, or her teacher Mr. Crockett, or her brother, or her father; anyone but the female parent who for 30 years unfailingly showed up, kept vigil, and delivered support.

Who might have been a better mother for Sylvia Plath? Charlotte Lowell? Donna Reed? Olive Higgins Prouty? Dr. Ruth Beuscher? (They all had more money.)

Aurelia's Letters Home foregrounded the two women’s tenacity as they were assailed, every day of their lives, by institutionalized forces invading their homes, heads, bodies, and pocketbooks: academia, politics, commerce, the double moral standard, medicine, sexism, gender roles. These forces have since tried with their every weapon to prove that the Plath women’s toughest battle was with each other. Sylvia Plath came to believe that, only furthering her distress.

Instead of focusing on the obstacles the Plath women, like all women, faced and made the best of, critics dwell on the rare examples of antagonism: two poems, "Medusa" and "The Disquieting Muses"; Sylvia's agitated accusations and projections in December 1958's blood-lusty journal entries ("Now this is what I feel my mother felt"); excerpts from her letters such as "Don't be so frightened, Mother! Every other word in your letter is 'frightened'!" (Aurelia's fears in late 1962 were entirely justified.) Sylvia didn't always like or want to resemble her mother, but she never risked their relationship by telling her so.

The tension worked both ways: Do not assume Aurelia always gladly served as Sylvia's crisis counselor, bursar, and supply line. She wept, lay awake, was exasperated, wrote snide comments in margins. Worry and sacrifice -- what Sylvia said she disliked about Aurelia -- were the price of supporting Sylvia's life and her talent, which bloomed as it did because of Aurelia's talent for mothering.

Theirs is not at all the first or only example of such teamwork. But it's well documented.

That's true even though Sylvia burned her mother's half of their correspondence. This absence of paper has made it easy to label Aurelia a zero, empty, a void with "no life of her own." It also saved a lot of work: There is no need to pay attention to a void.

Aurelia is the “elephant in the room,” the large, discomfiting, unglamorous, enduring factor that must be acknowledged and approached with a spirit of inquiry. Try to sidestep Aurelia by fetishizing details about, for example, the words Sylvia underlined in her books; where she lived or traveled; her sex life; the color of her lipstick -- and the cornerstone of her achievement is still Aurelia Plath, who loved literature and worked hard to get the best for her kids.

Readers are so stunned by the sheer volume of only one-half of their correspondence -- Sylvia's half -- we label their relationship "sick" or "too close." Today they'd be texting each other daily, or e-mailing or FaceTiming each week.

"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.

Aurelia's Marginal Notes: Some Stats

There are 1,934 pieces of correspondence in the Lilly Library's Sylvia Plath archive. Since posting here in 2013 I have updated in detail the shorthand annotations tally in the Plath mss. II boxes 1-6a in a post made on October 6, 2017: It stands at 159.

Tart Remarks From 1956

In May 1956, Sylvia's letters to Aurelia were gushing about her wonderful fiance Ted Hughes. Aurelia had never met Ted; she knew only that her daughter had met him three months before and that he was a poet with no job. Aurelia inked some Gregg shorthand notes on the letters, transcribed here for the first time:

On a letter of May 18, 1956, AP wrote: "About settled with Ted! I hope this will work out! Please God."

On a letter of May 26, 1956:  Next to SP's text "[o]ur children will have such fun," AP wrote,  "if they don't starve first."