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.

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.

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."

While Everyone Was Reading The Bell Jar . . .

The Bell Jar was new in the U.S. when I was in high school, and reading about Esther Greenwood's unnamed mother trying to force steno on her daughter, I was delighted and envious that Esther had been allowed to refuse. Little did I know I'd end up transcribing The Bell Jar's author's mother's shorthand.

Here's my high-school transcript. The left side records the office-skills track my own mother determined I would take. The Gregg shorthand courses were 1972-73's STENO 32 and 1973-74's STENO 42, graded B and A respectively.

The courses with "1.00" lasted all year; the .50 courses, one semester.

"Aurelia": What's in a Name?

In the periodic table of elements, "Au" stands for gold. The name "Aurelia" means "golden." It comes from the Latin adjective aureus, from the root word aurum: "gold." That in turn refers to the color yellow, specifically the color of the dawn; thus "Aurora," "goddess of the dawn, [who] renews herself every morning and flies across the sky, announcing the arrival of the sun," is a related name (Wikipedia). Julius Caesar's mother was named Aurelia. All accounts of her say she was respectable.

Aurelia Schober Plath, born in the U.S. in 1906, was the namesake of her own mother, Aurelia Grunwald (later Greenwood) Schober, born in Austria in 1887, when the name's popularity was near peaking in the U.S. according to census records. By 1906 the name was uncommon, ranking #496 in the Social Security Index tally of girls' names. It's trending upward in 2013, although it still isn't among the top 100 baby names.

Variants on the name Aurelia include Aurella, Auriel, and Aurielle.

Plath's volume Ariel (I'm using The Restored Edition here, but it's also true of the other edition) is stuffed with references to gold. Its first line says "Love set you going like a fat gold watch." Next page, "A ring of gold with the sun in it?" Then, "[i]n twenty-five years she'll be silver/ In fifty, gold." "The pure gold baby," "A gold filling," "my gold beaten skin/ Infinitely delicate," "gold-ruddy balls"-- you get it.

And of course if you've read about the poem "Medusa" you know "medusa" (Greek for "guardian or protectress") is a jellyfish grown to the familiar "dangling tentacles" stage, and that "Aurelia" is a genus of jellyfish, the most common kind, seen on the Atlantic beaches near Boston. Both Aurelia Plath and Sylvia knew that. Today we know there is a jellyfish discovered to be immortal.

Aurelia's Journals

I pinpointed a primary and secondary source mentioning Aurelia Plath's journals. In Jacqueline Rose's book The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991), in a chapter called "The Archive," on page 81, Rose writes, "As Aurelia Plath put it in an interview conducted in 1976, she had herself wanted to be a writer but didn't feel she could expose her children to the uncertainty of a writer's life." [Footnote 61].

The footnote said this interview is by Linda Heller, and titled "Aurelia Plath: A Lasting Commitment," received by Smith College, 24 February 1976. It adds, "Aurelia's notes for a talk on 16 March 1976 to the Wellesley College Club were in part based on the journal she kept at that time."

This footnote does not make it clear whether that information appears in the interview, or whether the interview was published ("received" is not "published"), and it isn't clear whether the journal referred to was a 1976 journal or earlier. The notes for the talk are at the Mortimer Library, Smith College.

Reference to a journal is echoed in a book by Luke Ferretter, Sylvia Plath's Fiction (2010), page 12, except in the body of the text, not as a footnote, and specifies the journal is from 1962:

Aurelia kept a journal (calling it a diary); she says so in Letters Home. She quotes her entry of August 3, 1958, on page 348 of the Harper & Row hardback. Her diaries from 1958 and especially 1962 would be an amazing resource; I wonder where they are, and if they are in shorthand, or partly so, and whether that is what keeps them obscure.

Salaries for Stenographers and Sylvia

In 2013, the median annual salary in the U.S. is $45,790; in 2013 a stenographer's median annual salary is $36,325. "Little or no degree of creativity and latitude required," notes the job description. Sylvia Plath knew that, and knew that she and shorthand weren't a good fit.

Lies: There hasn't been "profit" in stenography for 100 years.

Professional stenography began as a largely male occupation; we have Cicero's speeches because his slave invented his own form of shorthand. In the Victorian era, shorthand writers (mostly males, well-paid, using the Pitman system) had clubs and monthly magazines and "translated" classics into shorthand; it was even faddish. Around 1900, stenography began to be derided as women's work. "I'm going to be a stenographer when I get big," assserted eight-year-old Nan Bobbsey, in the first chapter of the first book of The Bobbsey Twins series (1904), proving that by then, stenography was an entirely acceptable occupational goal for middle-class girls. She'd earn about $35 every two weeks. In 1950 legal stenographers in the California Department of Justice--legal stenographers were among the best-paid--earned $2,770 per year or $106.53 every two weeks. In 1974 I was earning $168 every two weeks or $4,368 per year; median household income then was $9,718.

Is that proof enough that stenography was a job and not a career? Stenography and other secretarial skills allowed women the illusion of choice: Office jobs in industries that interested them, although with no chance for advancement, autonomy or even enough of a salary to feed and house them well. In a parallel, the family of a minority male working as a bank security guard could say he had a career "in banking."

Sylvia Plath saw this, and resented and refused it. Aurelia Plath saw the same but urged her to accommodate. Sylvia won this round. In 1957, age 24, Sylvia Plath was offered her first salaried position: a one-year teaching appointment at Smith College, teaching three sections of Freshman English per semester, for $4,200 (Letters Home, 12 March 1957). This kind of pay and status put her far ahead of the "stenos" of the time.