Aurelia Plath's Trips Abroad

Aurelia Plath traveled quite often, but only in later life. In 1956, she was 50 years old. In 1981, she was 75.

1981: Bermuda, May 18-25

1979: Antigua with Roberta Wood, April

1978: Antigua, with Roberta Wood

1973: England, Aug. 23-Sept. 5

1970: European Tour with Dot and Joe Benotti, June 4-30

1969: Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia with Marion Freeman, May 31-June 22

1967: England, July-August

1965: England, June 10-c. July 23

1964: England, June 10-July 1

1963: England, June 6-July 11

1962: England, June 21-August 4

1961: England, June 18-July 14

1958: Bermuda with Francis Schober, Sr. (father), arriving May 31

1956: England, France (eight days in Paris), Netherlands (five days in Amsterdam), Germany, Austria (three weeks), Switzerland (three weeks), England (nine days), June 13-August 14 [1]

1908: San Remo, Italy, with Aurelia Schober, Sr. (mother), according to Francis Schober's citizenship papers, and returning to the U.S. in May 1909, according to a ship's manifest. Aurelia was a toddler at the time and never mentioned this trip.

[1] Itinerary according to Aurelia's Christmas letter 1956 to Miriam Baggett (archive, Smith).

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.

Aurelia Plath and "The Case for Chastity"

Aurelia Plath gave Sylvia Plath a Reader’s Digest article titled “The Case for Chastity,” written by a married mother of four, cautioning young women against premarital sex. Sylvia bristled, and later trounced this article in her journal and in The Bell Jar, where it’s renamed “In Defense of Chastity.” 

But for that article, Sylvia might have wished to model herself after its author, Margaret Culkin Banning [pictured]. Banning’s New York Times obituary says she published 40 books, and 400 stories in the slick high-paying magazines Sylvia ached to write for. [1] Yet this bestselling novelist—Vassar graduate, a lawyer, pro-women’s rights—might have been forgotten without Plath’s reference to the chastity article, Exhibit A among Sylvia’s reasons Sylvia (and we) should hate her mother.

 

Reader’s Digest published “The Case for Chastity” in August 1937. It was so popular that in September, Harper (Margaret Banning’s publisher) printed it as a pamphlet. Tightly argued and exhaustive, it explains to would-be female sexual rebels and those putting off marriage the many ways unchastity can ruin their lives: diseases, babies, abortions, regrets, and, a new twist, psychological breakdowns. The article quotes statistics and experts. Read it for yourself, here.

 

Pamphlets were rife in the 1930s when folks were too poor to buy books. Aurelia Plath was into pamphlets. Her shorthand annotation on Sylvia’s letter of December 19, 1961, notes the Chicago address for a free pamphlet titled Adventures in Conversation. She hoped to forward this to Sylvia for little Frieda’s edification. Frieda was then 20 months old.

 

Exactly where Aurelia got “The Case for Chastity” and when she gave it to Sylvia is not known. [2] In autumn 1937, Sylvia was age four going on five, so not then. The pamphlet in its time was truly and insanely topical. In December 1936 the most reliable known birth control device, the pessary or diaphragm, became legal in the U.S.—if prescribed by a medical doctor for health reasons. This landmark case is called United States vs. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, and Margaret Sanger engineered it all. [3] Sylvia Plath in her “platinum summer” of 1954 had an illegal diaphragm; Massachusetts did not legalize birth control for singles until 1972. Yet diaphragms could be obtained from sympathetic doctors, or by stealth, or from overseas, or if you borrowed a wedding ring. In January 1954 Mary McCarthy published in Partisan Review a story opening with the shocking words “Get yourself a pessary,” later Chapter 3 in her novel The Group (1963). 

 

Aurelia Plath’s original preface to Letters Home (1975) included five paragraphs about how she provided her children with a liberal sex education. When they were school age she gave them a book called Growing Up. Aurelia wrote that she read and discussed frankly with Sylvia numerous edgy books and plays. Here is part of the preface that Aurelia’s editor cut:

 

. . .  In The Bell Jar an article from the Reader’s Digest, titled “The Case for Chastity,” is handed the heroine as a manual to be followed. Our shared reading, however, went far afield of this and went on intermittently throughout high school years and the first three years of college . . . We discussed the work and writings of Margaret Sanger, the unfairness of the double standard . . . I did tell my children that I hoped they would wait until they had completed their undergraduate education before involving themselves in what I considered a serious commitment with another life . . . The decision, however, had to be theirs. (47-48) [4]

 

“The Case for Chastity” as represented in The Bell Jar was a thorn in Aurelia’s side, belittling her years of conscientious mothering; and the cuts to her Letters Home preface erased her noble efforts utterly. However, the Rosenstein papers, opened in 2020, record that in 1953 Aurelia told Dr. Ruth Beuscher that Sylvia knew the facts of intercourse by age 15. Later additional mother-daughter discussions made Sylvia “extremely avid for the most minute detail about sex, and this caused [her] mother some embarrassment. But she answered all questions.” [5]

 

Also in the cut paragraphs, Aurelia tried to establish that she was not a prude. In New York in 1929 she saw a play banned in Boston, and in 1933 she delivered to the Boston University faculty wives’ book club a report about Brave New World—so full of drugs and sex the book is banned in some places today.

 

Aurelia’s status when at age 25 she married Otto Plath, 46, who was married the whole time they dated, is nobody’s business and no one should care. Yet the answer to “Was Aurelia a virgin?” could illuminate Aurelia’s character, the battleground Sylvia Plath tragically died on, dreading a life like her mother’s and seeing in her more bad than good. Whether yes or no, the culture is rigged so Aurelia cannot win. Had she been a man this would not be an issue.

[1] New York Times, January 6, 1982.

[2] Probably the pamphlet was mailed to Sylvia at college in 1954 when Aurelia was most worried about Sylvia’s chastity. Aurelia wrote biographer Linda Wagner-Martin in 1987 that along with the chastity article she gave Sylvia an article with an opposing viewpoint. (ASP to Wagner-Martin, October 29, 1987, p. 2.) I believe that is false.

[3] United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, 86 F.2d 737. Read the decision here at Justia.com.

[4] Plath mss. II, Box 9, folder 3, Lilly Library.

[5] “McLean Hospital Record,” Collection 1489, Box 3, Folder 10, Rose Library – Emory University Archives.

Errors of Fact in Aurelia's "Letters Home" Introduction

-Aurelia Frances Schober (later Plath) was born and lived her "early childhood" not in Winthrop, Massachusetts, but the working-class neighborhood of Boston called Jamaica Plain. Irish families were settled in Jamaica Plan when Aurelia was born in 1906; Italians began congregating there in 1910. Her family did not move to seaside Winthrop until 1918, when Aurelia would have been 11 or 12, well past early childhood. 

-It was at the close of Aurelia Schober's sophomore year, 1926, when a German-speaking, highly cultured guest professor at MIT hired her as his secretary. Letters Home says this happened "at the close of my junior year (1927)," but his diaries first mention "Miss A. Schober" in August 1926. He was 43, she 20. Aurelia gives broad hints but does not actually name Dr. Karl Terzaghi, or admit that the pair fell in love and dated for two years. Aurelia knew well, from her own notes, that they met in 1926. But placing their first meeting in 1927 makes Aurelia 21 years old instead of 20, shielding Karl, 50 years after the fact, from any jeers about cradle-robbing, and perhaps shielding herself from any side-eye about her naivete

-Otto Plath was born in April 1885 in the "country town of Grabow" in Prussia, but was still an infant when his parents moved 150 miles northwest to Budzyn, where Otto actually "grew up." Otto's five younger siblings were all born in Budzyn, beginning with Paul in December 1886. When Otto arrived in the U.S. he listed his last residence as Budzyn. (8)

-Otto Plath was 15 years old, not 16, when he arrived in the United States on September 9, 1900, according to the ship's manifest. 

-"[w]hen his father, years after his son's arrival here, came to the United States": Correctly, Otto's father Theodor Plath arrived in the U.S. less than a year after Otto did, in March 1901.

-Otto "spoke English without a trace of foreign accent" - those who had met him, interviewed in the 1970s by Harriet Rosenstein, said Otto spoke English with a German accent. (9)

-Frieda Plath Heinrichs, Otto's youngest sister, did not die in 1966 but in 1970. She and her husband's Walter's names appear together in California voter registration rolls until 1968, when Frieda's becomes the only name listed. Walter died May 26, 1967.

-A cost accountant figures out how much money a firm is really spending to put out its product. Aurelia's father Francis Schober was never a "cost accountant" for Boston's Dorothy Muriel bakery company. Rather, in the 1930s the former hotel headwaiter and maitre d' was listed as "manager" of dining rooms; in 1938 it's specifically a Dorothy Muriel bakery-tearoom on Tremont Street, one of a chain of about 50 local Dorothy Muriels. The Boston city directories for the 1940s list a Herman F. Schober, who was a relative, employed as a "cost accountant" for Measurement Engineering and the American Meter Company. Herman F. Schober was born in Boston in 1893, and between 1926 and 1940 the city directory gave his occupation as "foreman." 

Maybe Francis Schober counted the day's proceeds at his own Dorothy Muriel location, but he was never a "cost accountant" for Dorothy Muriel, which had its factory and offices in Allston. (28)

Take Note

-Aurelia Plath is careful to say her two siblings grew up in a matriarchy, but that she as the eldest was the only one of Schobers' children brought up in the European (patriarchal authoritarian) style. The Introduction says: "[m]y father made the important decisions during my childhood and early girlhood" (3) and Aurelia says that it did not occur to her, in her late teens, to argue when her father decreed she would attend either secretarial college or no college.

The Letters Home edition referred to is a hardbacked first edition, 1975.

Move Over, Daddy: Professor Aurelia Plath's University Teaching Career

“Sylvia Plath’s father was an entomologist and professor of biology at Boston University. Her mother was a shorthand teacher” is how biographies commonly explain it when Aurelia Plath’s job is mentioned at all, although she taught for 29 years at the same university. History.com says that after Otto Plath’s death in 1940, “Sylvia’s mother went to work as a teacher.” End of story. Less vague, from poetryfoundation.org: “Aurelia Plath taught advanced secretarial studies at Boston University.”

 

At Boston University, Aurelia was Professor Plath. Sylvia Plath called her that in one letter, but only one. [1] Aurelia Plath’s New York Times obituary calls Aurelia an “associate professor.” Yet no Plath biography or archival materials, including Aurelia’s own writings, answered the question: Professor of what?

 

Seeking information about Aurelia’s work life -- territory entirely unexplored -- I knew only that B.U. hired her in 1942 to establish a medical-secretarial program and teach it. Her employer, Boston University’s College of Practical Arts and Letters, closed in 1955, and B.U.’s College of Business absorbed it. Sounds disastrous, but in fact Aurelia got promoted. Sylvia wrote Ruth Beuscher in 1962 that her mother had lost her job. [2] Is that true? And besides Gregg shorthand, what did Aurelia teach? Can we have any sense at all of how Sylvia Plath’s mother spent most of her days?

 

I found out, thanks to Boston University archivist Jane Parr, who scoured and photocopied B.U. General Catalogue annuals. Meet the other Professor Plath:

 

1942: Instructor in Secretarial Studies

1947: Assistant Professor of Secretarial Studies

1957: Associate Professor of Secretarial Studies, College of Business Administration

1971: Associate Professor of Secretarial Studies, Emerita

 

But really, now: How demanding could secretarial studies be? It’s not as if it was a real discipline like Otto’s, or taught anything serious, right? Here’s a sample of what Aurelia taught, from the 1967-68 Boston University General Catalogue’s course listings, with my commentary:

 

SE 203, 204. MEDICAL SECRETARIAL PROCEDURES. Prerequisite: SE 102, 104, 131, 134.  

 

-Prerequisite SE 102 was Shorthand II; SE 104, Typewriting II. From the B.U. School of Medicine, Professor Plath brought Drs. Alice Marston and Matthew Derow to teach SE 131 and 134:

 

SE 131. Human Biology for Medical Secretaries. Background in anatomy and physiology for the secretary in the physician’s office. Lectures and demonstrations using skeletons, dissections, histological slides, films, and other practical material.

 

SE 134. Bacteriology for Medical Secretaries. Survey of the principles of bacteriology. Application to the fields of food, nutrition, and medical diagnosis.

 

-After acing those courses, you may enroll in Professor Plath’s 12-credit two-semester course:

 

SE 203-204. MEDICAL SECRETARIAL PROCEDURES. Development of secretarial skills, with emphasis on accuracy and speed in transcribing from shorthand and from recording machines. Use of office machines, including the IBM Executive typewriter. Medical terminology and transcription of medical case histories and correspondence. Practical problems in office and records management, including filing systems.

 

-The medical-secretarial student then faced SE 232, which Professor Plath might have coordinated, but others must have taught:

 

MEDICAL SECRETARIAL LABORATORY. Lectures and demonstrations in hematology, clinical pathology, tissue pathology, and clinical chemistry. Lectures and library research in areas related to the present-day practice of medicine. Field trips.

 

-I cannot prove, but I will bet, that Professor Plath taught also the course SE 419, limited to senior students in the Business Education division:

 

SHORTHAND METHODS LABORATORY. Perfection through practice of the basic techniques of teaching shorthand, such as blackboard shorthand writing, introduction of principles and brief forms, and dictation.

 

-Aurelia’s boss at that time was Donald G. Stather, Professor of Secretarial Studies and Business Education; B.S. in Ed., State College at Salem; Ed.M., Ed.D., Boston University. He supervised an all-female faculty of five.

 

Then, in the 1969-70 General Catalogue, the College of Business Administration announced:

 

The programs in Secretarial Studies have been discontinued with the last entering class in September 1968. Students presently enrolled in the program should consult the Division of Secretarial Studies for curriculum requirements.

 

The end was near for what must have been among the most rigorous of medical secretarial programs. In 1970, Professor Plath was age 64, one year away from mandatory retirement. B.U.’s pension plan for profs was 20 percent of their salary. [3] Lacking the money to retire, Professor Plath hoped for five more years of teaching work at Cape Cod Community College, where she taught secretarial studies from the autumn of 1970 until 1973. Then Professor Plath asked for and was granted time off to edit Letters Home.

 

[1] SP to ASP, November 22, 1962, refers to Aurelia as “Professor A.S. Plath.”

[2] SP to Ruth Beuscher, September 22 and 29, 1962.

[3] ASP to Hilda Farrar, April 20, 1970.

A favorite piece of Aureliana: B.U. President John Silber’s letter promoting Aurelia into joblessness, with Aurelia's correction of his Latin.

"One Sweet Ulcerous Ball": A Chronology

Aurelia Plath suffered from and wrote frankly about her stomach ulcer before studies in the 1980s proved that most chronic ulcers are caused by a bacterium, H. pylori, spread by person-to-person contact and treatable with antibiotics. Before then doctors said stress caused ulcers. In white-collar cases, it was “executive stress,” which gave those ulcers value as proof the sufferers had worked too hard and given too much.

 

So Aurelia very much wanted her ulcer story, and its dramatic surgical cure, written into the Plath narrative. She tastelessly told People magazine (October 27, 1975) about her ulcer, and in her introduction to Letters Home linked its origin and episodic activity to the burdens she carried as a wife, widow, and breadwinning mother. She linked ulcer attacks to Sylvia’s 1953 suicide attempt in Letters Home (138) and blamed those events for her 1955 subtotal gastrectomy in a letter to Judith Kroll (1 December 1978) and in notes for a speech in 1979. For the latter, Aurelia wrote, in Gregg shorthand, “Mention my operation following her [Sylvia’s] recovery for her breakdown. She had said, ‘You pretended it hadn’t happened.’ With 3/4 of my stomach removed, the long scar on my abdomen alone would not allow me to forget! I lived in dread of a recurrence.” (1)

 

Otto Plath’s final illness and leg amputation haunt Sylvia’s life and later creative work. Aurelia Plath’s 17-year illness, with its gruesome internal hemorrhaging, does not; or maybe it does and no one has yet perceived it. (2) Sylvia’s Journal belittles Aurelia’s bleeding as drama, calls her “one sweet ulcerous ball,” and mentions bad breath, a symptom of H. pylori infection. (3)

 

Aurelia in Letters Home wrote that her duodenal ulcer formed two years before her husband Otto’s death, meaning 1938. The family was then living in Winthrop to enjoy its beaches, so it is possible Aurelia became infected or co-infected with the parasitic Giardia duodenalis from the sewage piped into Boston Harbor. (4) In February 1943, the Plaths’ first winter in Wellesley, Aurelia hemorrhaged while shoveling snow and was hospitalized. In March, Sylvia mailed letters to Aurelia at Pratt Diagnostic Hospital, where Aurelia’s brother-in-law Joe Benotti headed the chemistry laboratory. Aurelia hemorrhaged again in July, and from summer camp Sylvia, age ten, wrote Aurelia c/o Aurelia’s sister, Dorothy Benotti, “Are you well? I worry when I don’t receive letters from you” (July 18).

 

Aurelia had unrelated surgery in September 1947. This is noted in Sylvia’s diary and commemorated in Sylvia’s poem “Missing Mother,” mailed to Aurelia at Carney Hospital. Brief and scattered mentions in Sylvia’s letters, and a few notes, then become our only clues to Aurelia’s health. The ulcer stirs in February 1951; its stressor is not clear. Aurelia’s mother, Sylvia’s “Grammy,” the Plath family housekeeper, falls ill in early 1953 and Aurelia is distraught. On May 13 Sylvia writes her brother that their mother is eating baby food “again.” Aurelia takes that summer off from teaching, but Sylvia’s suicide attempt in August and months of hospitalization vex the ulcer. It begins bleeding, Aurelia noted, in April 1954, but she might have kept this from Sylvia because it is July before Sylvia mentions her mother’s “nasty ulcer pains.” That September Sylvia chides her mother, “You know that any problem makes you sick.” On October 1, 1954, Sylvia writes Aurelia c/o The New England Medical Center, and the ulcer is an issue at least until November.

 

On January 29, 1955, Sylvia comforts Aurelia after another ulcer attack. There is yet another in April. Now Aurelia has been sick for a year. Admitted to Newton-Wellesley Hospital in May, Aurelia is intravenously fed to build her up for her gastrectomy. Then, the death-defying-mother moment: With doctors’ permission, Aurelia on June 6, 1955 travels in a station wagon, flat on a mattress, to Sylvia’s graduation from Smith College. One witness says Aurelia was carried on a litter to the ceremony grounds. The gastrectomy is June 10. On June 24, Sylvia writes Aurelia, “Welcome Home!,” and on July 6 writes her brother that Aurelia is convalescing and friends are lining up to see her.

 

Aurelia, and Napoleon, and that character on Mad Men—if their chronic ulcers came not from responsibilities but from H. pylori, are they still to be admired? Stress aggravates whatever ill one has, but it turns out that “executive stress” is a myth from a misbegotten study of rhesus monkeys, its result pushed by antacid manufacturers. The fact is that ulcers afflict low-status workers much more often than bosses. (5) Today a popular meme blames “working too hard, being strong for too long” for another life-threatening, invisible illness—depression; Sylvia’s cross.

 

(1) Box 9, folder 11, “Letters Home – Notes.” Sylvia Plath Papers, Smith College.

(2) https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324990#symptoms. Sylvia Plath in summer 1951 overheard her employer, a physician, discussing a patient’s duodenal ulcer, and quoted his description of its symptoms in her journal, wondering how she might work it into a story. (Journals, entry 109, p. 87)

(3) Journals, December 12, 1958.

(4) The anti-parasitic drug Flagyl was not available in the U.S. until 1962.

(5) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-myth-of-executive-str/.

Aurelia Plath's Grave: "No One Ever Mentions"

photo by Shaun L. Kelly

Aurelia Plath lived for 31 years after Sylvia’s death and died of Alzheimer’s disease on March 11, 1994, age 87, at the North Hill retirement complex in Needham, MA. She was buried near her parents, the Schobers, in the Woodlawn Cemetery in Wellesley.

 

These photos of Aurelia’s grave were taken by Shaun L. Kelly, Wellesley native, Wellesley High School graduate and student of Wilbury Crockett's (Sylvia’s favorite teacher), who has memories of Aurelia Plath. From 1970 to 1973, teenaged Kelly worked after school as a grocery-store bagger, and when Mrs. Plath shopped he carried her bags to her car. They’d have pleasant, affable chats. Kelly remembers that Mrs. Plath wore a “ratty grayish-like coat that did look bad, but very academic, like a lot of teachers you’d see,” and she had a wonderful laugh. When The Bell Jar became a bestseller and the talk of the town in 1971, Kelly politely refrained from asking Mrs. Plath about the book. A few years later when they met by chance, Mrs. Plath remembered Shaun the grocery boy and was thrilled he had chosen a career in education. Kelly [@ShaunLKelly1955] is a Sylvia Plath fan and has taught for 31 years at a Connecticut high school. He says that in Sylvia's final BBC recordings her voice and Aurelia's sound identical.

 

Kelly’s parents too are buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, 50 yards from Mrs. Plath. Aurelia's is not a gravestone like that of her parents, the Schobers, but a “flush marker,” meaning “flush with the ground,” now almost obscured by grass. “I feel obligated enough that I still take care of her grave when I go up and see Mom and Dad,” Kelly said in an interview. “Obviously, if I didn’t like her, and if she were a jerk, I never would have gone over there to pay my respects, but every time I go to my parents’ grave I make sure to see Mrs. Plath as well. I almost feel obligated, it looks so forlorn. I know how Sylvia’s grave is a monument, almost like a celebratory, iconic place to visit for thousands every year, but Mrs. Plath’s grave no one ever mentions, and that makes me sad.”

Aurelia's parents' gravestone with her marker in the foreground

A Birthday Present for Aurelia

It's Aurelia Plath's 115th birthday (born April 26, 1906). Happy birthday, Sylvia's mom, and here is a present for you.

Hoping to write Sylvia Plath's biography, researcher Harriet Rosenstein on June 16, 1970, interviewed Sylvia's psychiatrist Dr. Ruth Barnhouse Beuscher, who treated Sylvia at McLean Hospital in 1953 and later. Among the first topics Rosenstein and Beuscher discussed was The Bell Jar as autobiography. Rosenstein took extensive notes, now in the Rosenstein Papers at Emory University. (How do I know what's in those papers? I went there in March 2020.)

Beuscher told Rosenstein The Bell Jar is factual, that what happened to its narrator Esther Greenwood happened to Sylvia, but some events were moved or altered. Fourth on the list:

"Esther's easy admission that she hated her mother [is] inaccurate. She [Sylvia] had spent at least the first month in the hospital asserting that she loved her mother. Beuscher says that she had to work hate admission out of Sylvia."

Aurelia, when Rosenstein interviewed you a few weeks later, in July, you blamed psychiatry for making Sylvia hate you. For the rest of your life you kept saying and writing that. Now we have Beuscher's word for what happened.

Beuscher by 1970 had become a Christian theologian like her father but was also deeply interested in the occult. She pursued a personal friendship with Rosenstein and entrusted to her the desperate letters Sylvia wrote to Beuscher in 1962 and 1963.

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.

Aurelia Plath's Live-In Students

In her letter of September 28, 1956, Sylvia Plath responded with horror to her mother’s idea to rent out a room in the family home in Wellesley: “So glad you aren’t renting room. DON’T!” Sylvia – then living temporarily with her in-laws in England – went on to explain why sharing living space was awful.

But in 1957 Sylvia heartily approved of the familiar "Aunt Marion" Freeman, Aurelia's friend and mother of Sylvia's childhood playmates, moving in with Aurelia during the year Ted and Sylvia were in the United States. "Aunt Marion" lived with Aurelia at least until May 1958. [1]  

So it wasn't unprecedented when, after Sylvia's death, Aurelia took in at least two more roomers. These were young women, her students from Boston University.  

In 1966, Aurelia was living alone in a house full of memories. Sylvia was three years dead; Aurelia's father had died the year before. Ted Hughes had written Aurelia forbidding her to visit England in 1966; it was the first summer in five years Aurelia would not see her grandchildren. Aurelia wrote on Hughes' letter, in black marker, "BOMB #1" -- signifying that she made this annotation in retrospect -- and drew a tearful face. Then the sensational U.S. release of Ariel in June let the whole world know Aurelia's daughter had killed herself. Strangers phoned asking whether Sylvia's "Daddy" had really been a Nazi. It was as if Sylvia had died a second time. Aurelia, overwhelmed, couldn't eat or sleep.

During that turbulent year Aurelia had a student living with her. To her friend Miriam Baggett on April 19, 1966, Aurelia wrote, “When my 19-year-old student is here with me, I can submerge myself in her interests and problems.” On July 7 Aurelia wrote Baggett about “my teenager here” who “spills out her difficulties nightly.” The student is never named.

 

Ten years later a journalist came to the Wellesley house to profile Aurelia for Boston University’s alumnae magazine. She mailed Aurelia a draft of her article. Aurelia struck out its whole third paragraph, which read: “When one favorite student contracted mononucleosis and thought she would have to quit school, [Mrs.] Plath brought her home for ‘rest and relaxation’ and the young woman ended up staying for two years. Today they still maintain their friendship.” [2] 

 

This was a different student. This longer-term roomer occupied the Wellesley house while Aurelia taught at Cape Cod Community College during 1970-71. In July 1970 Aurelia wrote her longtime friend and former high-school student Mary Stetson Clarke: “I shall let a friend live in my house here -- she is with me now five days a week . . . she returns to her home every Friday evening for the weekend.” In April 1971 Aurelia wrote, again to Clarke: “If my good friend can continue to live in my Wellesley home . . .” The arrangement must have been satisfactory.

 

So Aurelia’s having occasional live-ins was not a secret, but Aurelia -- by 1976 known for editing Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home -- did not want her fellow Boston University alumnae or the wider public to know.

 

The friendship with the second student was durable. Aurelia told a correspondent in 1983 that her "one-time student friend, who is now with her own family spending a year in Wurtzburg, West Germany," had recently phoned and her voice "came through with perfect clarity." [3] 

 

[1] Sylvia Plath to Aurelia S. Plath, 24 May 1957.

[2] The draft is in Smith College’s Sylvia Plath Papers IX, “Aurelia Plath.” The published article is “Aurelia Plath: A Lasting Commitment,” by Linda Heller, in Bostonia (Boston University alumnae magazine) Spring 1976, 36.

[3] ASP to Mary Ann Montgomery, 12 May 1983.

The White Waiter: Sylvia Plath's Grandfather at Work

More cosmopolitan than either his daughter or granddaughter was Frank Schober, Aurelia Plath's father and Sylvia Plath's "Grampy," headwaiter at Boston's elegant Hotel Thorndike from 1908 to 1921. He spoke four European languages; neither Aurelia nor Sylvia ever matched that. Schober had worked in hospitality since his boyhood in Austria and then in Italy, France, and England. Neither his daughter nor his granddaughter ever went abroad to find work.

Schober had arrived in the U.S. in June 1902, stating his destination as Magnolia, Massachusetts, where rich Americans vacationed at seaside resort hotels. He is listed in the Boston city directory as a "headwaiter" in 1905, and "Hotel Thorndike" is first specified in 1908. His brother Henry was a waiter there too.

Credit: New York Public Libraries

Built in 1886 on "Boston's Fifth Avenue," Boylston Street, by the Public Garden, Hotel Thorndike was one of giant knot of downtown Boston hotels built from the Gilded Age into the Jazz Age. Thousands of recent European immigrants like Frank and Henry Schober staffed the Thorndike, the Parker House, Hotel Vendome, the Westminster, the Touraine, the Lenox, and more.

European staff, desirable in these "European-style" hotels, displaced African-Americans who'd held those jobs during the 19th century. African-American waiters were well organized by the 1880s and making gains. [1] European hotel staff in 1904 created their own trade association, the international Geneva Association of Hotel and Restaurant Employees. The Boston Globe noted in 1908 that the Association's annual ball drew 2000 attendees, many not arriving until after 11 p.m. when their shifts ended. Frank Schober served on the reception committee. The hotels' owners were invited and feted. [2] 

The Geneva Association was not a labor union. In that time and place "Geneva" seems to have evolved into a code word for "white." [3] In case of a strike, hoteliers could replace white staff with African-Americans, as happened in New York City in 1912. The striking white workers became furious not at management but at the African-Americans.

The Hotel Thorndike had a relatively modest 150 rooms, 100 with private baths. Handwritten on the Thorndike picture postcard is "The English Room is the best place in Boston." Harvard students frequented the hotel's Olde English Room and were sometimes thrown out. 

"American-style" hotels provided lodging plus meals. In "European-style" hotels, guests paid for their own meals, so it paid to have a fine hotel restaurant. Here is a December 1907 Thorndike dinner menu [click to enlarge. I will have the roast duck, thank you. How easily I imagined myself the served rather than the server]. The Thorndike also gets credit as the first Boston hotel to make an event out of New Year's Eve, packaging food and drink with entertainment and lodging.

Prohibition, enacted in 1920, ruined fine dining and cut off highly profitable liquor sales, so it is no surprise that Frank Schober's headwaiter job changed and then vanished. From 1924 to 1926 he worked in Swampscott, Mass., hosting at a dine-and-dance palace called The Sunbeam. In 1929 he was a steward at the Hotel Westminster. Then came the Great Depression, and the grand-hotel era was over.

Aurelia's father, 1910

Also gone, forever, in America: "waiter" as a steady job that might support a family. Schober in the 1930s managed unspecified dining rooms, and in 1938 specifically a bakery-tearoom, Dorothy Muriel's, at 127 Tremont Street, one of a chain of about 50 local Dorothy Muriels. [4] The 1940 census shows him unemployed at the end of 1939. [5] As of 1942 he worked as maitre d' at the Brookline Country Club. The "Grampy" Sylvia Plath knew best was required to live at work.

Traits of a good headwaiter: patience, poise, supervisory skills, and a knack for service. Complaining in letters to her mother about how hard it was, Sylvia waited tables for a month in summer 1952 before getting sinusitis and, instead of facing her manager and quitting, had Aurelia do it. Waiting tables was by then a default job, menial, the last in any list of Sylvia's choices; a part-time job for minorities and students. Plath scholars portray it as almost tragic that Plath had to serve lunches or chop vegetables at her Smith College dormitory to earn part of her tuition.

Sylvia Plath had The Bell Jar's narrator kick an African-American orderly who was serving dinner. Now we have further context for that seemingly gratuitous act.

[1] "An African-American Waiters' Ball, Boston, 1892," The American Menu, August 11, 2014. Web.

[2] Boston Globe, "More Than 2000 Make Merry," Dec. 15, 1908, p. 9.

[3] Boston Globe, Sept. 21, 1914, p. 6, reports on a Boston waiter's marathon swim and lists three fellow waiters in his support boat: Francis Schober, Fred Kreuzer, and A. Tussin "of the Geneva Athletic and Swimming Club."

[4] The Dorothy Muriel's bakery chain was bought out in 1940 by what eventually became Brigham's bakery and ice-cream shops.

[5] In Winthrop in mid-March 1940, Frank Schober reported to the federal census that he had been unemployed for 13 weeks and was seeking work as a restaurant manager.

Aurelia in Drag

"When students of the Boston College of Practical Arts and Letters gave a play recently, Miss Aurelia Schober was the leading man," says the caption.

Discovered in the obscure Eustis [FL, near Orlando] Daily Lake Region newspaper, March 4, 1926, page 8: a unique photo of college girl Aurelia Schober in faraway Boston, Massachusetts, outfitted as a man for her role in her college's German Club play. At the all-female Boston University College of Practical Arts and Letters (CPAL) German-Club theatricals, Aurelia was often (always?) cast as a man, being tall and talented. [See an earlier, related post noting her acting.]

The image must have been quite striking for an editor in Eustis, population then 2800, to clip from its original background and print.

Boston University's College of Arts and Letters' well-staffed and industrious Press Club regularly sent press releases with college news to numerous papers. Occasionally the Club's copy or photos were published in the Boston Herald, Boston Traveler, Boston Globe, Boston Evening Transcript. Photos were expensive to print and send, so how did this get to Florida? We do know that CPAL enrolled at least one student from Florida.

Aurelia's stage career extended beyond her college graduation in 1928 to a role (as a female) at Brookline High School in 1930, a performance Aurelia remembered impressed a theatrical agent in the audience.

The Two Aurelias in San Remo, Italy

Aurelia Frances Schober was born in Boston on April 26, 1906 to Aurelia and Francis Schober, both natives of Austria. On February 8, 1909 in Boston, Francis Schober completed his U.S. Petition for Naturalization form: citizenship papers found copied in the Plath archives. Francis filled in its blanks:

My wife’s name is Aurelia. She was born in Vienna, Austria, and now resides at San Remo, Italy. I have one child, and the name, date and place of birth, and place of residence of said children is as follows: Aurelia F., April 26, 1906  Boston Mass.  San Remo, Italy. 

 

What? [Click the image to enlarge.] In February 1909 Aurelia F. Schober is not yet three years old, but away “residing” with her mother on the Italian Riviera? This is never mentioned again in any archives.

 

Located between Genoa and Monte Carlo, San Remo was and still is a residence and retreat for Europe’s wealthy and cultured. Empress Maria Alexandrovna after a visit in 1874 donated the now famous San Remo seaside promenade. Alfred Nobel’s former home there is a museum now. 

 

Francis Schober wrote “San Remo” on this form twice and clearly, so it is unlikely to be an error. 

A ship’s manifest for the Kaiser Wilhelm II, sailing from Bremen on May 18, 1909 and docking at Ellis Island May 26, 1909 yielded, on Lines 13 and 14, two Aurelia Schobers, the younger represented by ditto marks and the designation “ch.” For the adult Aurelia, the clerk scrawled: “U.S.A. Citizen” and “husb U.S.C [citizen].” [1] (By default, wives then took their husband’s nationality.) Aurelia Senior had left the U.S. an alien but returned a citizen, or a soon-to-be one. Francis's full citizenship was granted by the court on July 10, 1909. A handwritten note on Francis's Oath of Allegiance says as of July 6 his new address is 2049 Columbus Avenue, Boston.

 

So mother and daughter Schober were in May 1909 returning from at least four months overseas. If too young to recall that trip, did Aurelia Plath never hear her parents reminisce? Because Francis had a San Remo link too.

 

According to the ship's manifest, when Francis (as “Francois”) Schober left Europe for the U.S. in 1902, boarding the ship Vancouver in Naples [his Petition for Naturalization, dated 1909, says "Genoa"] he listed his last job as “butler” in San Remo. [2] Why in 1909 were his wife, age 21, and small daughter “residing” there? If vacationing, wouldn't their residence be Boston? Was Aurelia Senior “wintering” with relatives she had last seen in Vienna in 1904, bringing her toddler namesake? Did she find a job there? (San Remo's posh Casino Municipale opened in 1905.) Had Francis proudly sent his wife and daughter on a fine vacation? Perhaps they were not in San Remo but somewhere else. A mystery half-solved. 

Notes

[1] Year: 1909; Arrival: New York, New York, USA; Microfilm Serial: T715, 1897-1957; Line: 14; Page Number: 28. Ancestry.com. New York, Passenger and Crew Lists (including Castle Garden and Ellis Island), 1820-1957 (database on-line). Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010.

[2] The National Archives at Washington, D.C.; Washington, D.C.; Series Title: Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at Boston, Massachusetts, 1891-1943; NAI Number: 4319742; Record Group Title: Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1787-2004; Record Group Number: 85; Series Number: T843; NARA Roll Number: 052. [Francois Schober is on line 9.]

Inside "Ocean 1212-W"

892 Shirley Street, Winthrop, Mass. USA, photographed in 2018.

Sylvia Plath claimed her grandparents' house at Point Shirley as her true childhood home and spiritual nexus in a 1962 essay we know as "Ocean 1212-W." Prepare for a unique and savory treat: Aurelia's Austrian beau Karl in 1926 described in his diary his first view of and visit to the town of Winthrop and Point Shirley, and an evening in Aurelia's family home. Present were her parents (later "Grammy" and "Grampy" Schober; Karl culls a few new facts) and Aurelia's siblings, future aunt and uncle to Sylvia and Warren. More about Karl here. I discovered this passage in May and you are the first to read it. It's verbatim and I think beautiful. Thanks to the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute for granting access to the Karl Terzaghi diaries. Diary page numbers are in the brackets.

Diary 26.1, p. 104 October 24, 1926

Yesterday, Saturday, met A. at the [105] Public library, lunch among lights and colors at Brau Haus, a delightful, quiet hour. After lunch to Orient Heights, from hill above station one of the most beautiful views of Boston I ever saw. Beacon Hill in blue grey against the lighter sky, dominated by the Custom House tower. Chelsea: a series of drumlins with gentle skyline covered with grey houses. At the foot of the hill the red brown saltmarshes with wide, winding channels, mother of pearl; so beyond Beachmont N.E., the silver grey ocean, the horizon behind the flat, grey shape of Nahant Island on the horizon & in the East [106] the friendly hills and narrows & peninsula of Winthrop. From the Orient Heights we wandered across Winthrop, & on the Boulevard, along the beach, from Drumlin to Drumlin: Grovers Cliff, Winthrop Head and out to Shirley Point: the ocean calm, in color reminding the Persian sea, now and then a low, gentle wave breaking at the beach. Dark stone standing out of the water – low tide, a brown belt of sea weed stretching between the water and the seawall – the dominating white water tank of Winthrop [107] Head standing like the tower of a Sarazene castle – and the dear little girl with shining brown eyes, showing her treasures, the beach, and the walls and the sea she loves. An evening in her home at Shirley Point, remote from the world. Her mother a plump little lady with irregular features, brutish forehead, but lovable and kind and goodnatured. The father, who arrived somewhat later, serious, official, simple, but sincere, agreeable, regular features. Assistant manager of the Alston Manor. The light and [108] the beauty of the home: The children. Sitting at the fireplace, fed with driftwood, paved with cobblestones from the Drumlins. A., the oldest, with her gentle, lovable features, her sister, fifteen, a strong husky girl, with clear, open grey eyes, blond, straight hair and a strong nice chin, and finally came the little boy, warm from his bed, insisted to see me, tried to behave like a little man, and explained to me his monkey. – About storms in Winthrop, the breakers washing through the gaps between the houses, the children [109] spending days on the beach, in bathing suits, in direct touch with gentle and violent nature – the library in Shirley Point, grocery store a little world in itself. The father from Aussee, Gasthof Schober, wanted to study medicine, some time in Italy, met in London brother of his wife, both went over to Boston and settled. His brother-in-law headwaiter at Copley Plaza. The early days of the young couple, tramping up in White Mountains, since then living in this little home, no travels, except the family for short time [110] to Colorado Springs – her father.

            Towards eleven I left, went with A. and her father around the Shirley Point back to W. station beautiful moonlight, the ocean calm. The dear little girl tight at my side and while we walked behind her father, I told her silently how I felt, by a kiss.

            Today, a quiet day, still under the impression of yesterday’s evening. The picture of the girl was with me: her innocence, her happiness at her wealth in her modest surroundings, the [111] blessings of an education paid for by the self restraint of conscientious parents, a bud, on the point of becoming a flower – her lovable way of nursing the smaller ones of the family, the drumlins and the ocean as a background. I had the feeling as if I had found something I was longing for since years.

While Sylvia Went Missing, 1953

In the Daily Boston Globe newspapers of August 25 and 26, 1953, the search that used Boy Scouts, police and dogs to try to locate the "beautiful Smith girl missing at Wellesley" was front-page news. Peter K. Steinberg's research showed that news of Sylvia Plath's disappearance ran in newspapers all over the United States, but the source story sent over the national wire came from the Globe, the Plaths' hometown paper, and its reportage was from Wellesley. The Globe interviewed and quoted Plath's mother, Mrs. Aurelia Plath, on August 26, 1953:

"She [Sylvia] recently felt she was unworthy of the confidence held for her by the people she knew," Mrs. Plath said. "For some time she has been able to write neither fiction, or her more recent love, poetry. 

"Instead of regarding this as just an arid period that every writer faces at times, she believed something had happened to her mind, that it was unable to produce creatively anymore.

"Although her doctor assured us this was simply due to nervous exhaustion, Sylvia was constantly seeking for ways in which to blame herself for the failure and became increasingly despondent." 

This is the most complete version of this quotation. Other papers trimmed or summarized this quotation ("Mrs. Plath said her daughter had been depressed") -- because newspaper stories must fit their pages and fit among other stories.

Of particular interest is that the quotation calls poetry Plath's "more recent love."

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.

Off, Off, Eely Tentacle!

It's interesting to see, in the archives, what Aurelia chose to omit from Letters Home. (What Ted Hughes wanted cut from it is another story.)  Cut from Sylvia's letter of October 2, 1956 is a particularly long list of requests to her mother for material goods and time-consuming favors, one of many such lists omitted. Written from Cambridge, this letter says Ted will be easy to buy Christmas gifts for because he needs everything, and Sylvia plans to

• buy him a briefcase (and Sylvia herself needs one, too; it's the most important piece of writers' luggage) and 
• a bathrobe. Or maybe Aurelia can send the bathrobe? Sylvia asks that it be "warm but not bulky" and specifies the brand name, Viyella. 
• And will Aurelia "please, please" shop for, buy, wrap and send two separate, highly specific wedding gifts to two of Sylvia's American school friends? Sylvia wants to set a precedent so that when she and Ted have their wedding reception in Wellesley, her friends will send gifts. 
• Sylvia adds, "Now, sometime at your convenience, could you send me my two German grammars," and 
• "could we have a few packets, at least three, of corrasable bond" (because that kind of typing paper is hard to find in England). 
• Sylvia finishes the list with "Could you investigate about addresses of children's book publishers--I have no addresses here; you could just look in the bookstores, perhaps. . ."

Aurelia noted in the letter's margins that she could send them her own briefcase; wrote "No" about the bathrobe because Viyella was an English brand; wrote "where?" next to the request for the German grammar books, and sent four packets of corrasable bond. In Gregg shorthand, she penciled the word "omit" twice in the letter's right margin, a word she wrote on dozens of letters while editing Letters Home.

The "Manipulatively Controlling Mother"

A respected critic calls Aurelia Plath “a manipulatively controlling mother” without stating any facts to back that up. [1] That Sylvia Plath had good reasons to hate her mother is something fans seem to “know” and accept without question. Here are their primary proofs that Sylvia hated her mother: one searing journal entry dated 12 December 1958; the assertion that priggish Mrs. Greenwood in the novel The Bell Jar is exactly what Aurelia was like; and the poem “Medusa” (originally titled “Mum”) that portrays Mum as a monster.

It turns out, however, that Sylvia in 1953, after her suicide attempt, spent her first month in the mental hospital telling her psychiatrist she loved her mother, and had to be talked into hating her. This is what the psychiatrist said in papers in a new Sylvia Plath archive opened to the public in January 2020. See what those papers say here.

Almost all of what biographers and critics write about Aurelia Plath is negative, as if facts were few and scanty. They aren't. They have simply been ignored. Please see this short video introducing some facts about Aurelia Plath's life: her college years, her job, how if Aurelia wasn't an easy mother to have, Sylvia was not an easy daughter to have. 

We underestimate Sylvia if we think she was easy to manipulate and control!

[1] David Trinidad, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” Plath Profiles, Vol. 3 (2010) Supplement: Autumn 2010, p. 126. 

See also "How Did Aurelia Plath Manipulate and Control Sylvia Plath?" blog post 11 July 2023.