Sappho the Cat (1959-1975)

Aurelia Plath with Sappho, c. 1972

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in 1959 acquired a tiger kitten but could not keep it: That summer the couple traveled the U.S., spent autumn at a writers' retreat, and in December packed up and moved to England. Sylvia had named the cat, a female, Sappho, and on 21 January wrote Esther Baskin from Boston:

"Did Ted or I tell you we are owners of a kitling? Granddaughter on one side of a cat belonging to Thomas Mann . . . The minute she walked into our apartment she went straight for a book of poems lying flat on the lowest bookshelf and possessed it."

Guess who fostered Sappho while her owners traveled, and inherited Sappho when her owners left the country less than a year after adopting her.

Fortunately, Aurelia Plath liked pets. Otto Plath had not allowed any. Aurelia quoted eight-year-old Sylvia as saying, "I'm so glad Daddy died; now I can have a cat." The family adopted one, named it Mowgli, and Sylvia loved him and dressed him up in baby clothes. Mowgli went missing in 1945. There's a photo of Warren and Sylvia with Sylvia holding Mowgli's mother Mitzi.

In letters sent to Aurelia from London, Sylvia inquired often after Sappho, who grew into a "huge" adult and in 1960 gave birth to triplets. Sappho the cat was not a burden but a happy note and a comfort in Aurelia's life as it collapsed all around her. Neighbor and friend Beth Hinchliffe much later wrote a poem remembering Aurelia around 1971, suggesting that Sappho's imperturbable presence served as a kind of therapy:

And now there is only Sappho for Aurelia . . .

And through it all, through Aurelia's blinding fury,

the madness of anguish, the desperate scrabbling

to keep her memories untouched by ugliness,

Sappho sits. Kneads. Watches.

Among Aurelia's snapshots in the Plath Family Papers at the Beinecke Library was a dime-sized photo of Sappho's face, cut from another photo. The fragment was too small to photograph, but it looked like a duplicate or alternate of the one shown above: a memento only Aurelia could have gone to the trouble to make and put there. And now I have a good idea why Aurelia's American granddaughters sent her, in 1980, stationery printed with a cartoon of a large self-satisfied tiger cat.

Aurelia had to ask someone to care for Sappho while she took annual trips to England in the early 1960s. Most likely some neighbors did. On returning to Wellesley in 1964 (July 2): "My kitchen was a smelly mess; Sappho's liver dish never washed and putrid." On returning to Wellesley in 1965 (30 June) Aurelia wrote, "Sappho, glad to see me, but unforgiving; when I pick her up, stiffens spine!"

The above photo is dated 1972. On 19 August 1975, Aurelia had terminally ill Sappho, age 16, put to sleep and grieved her, but not because Sappho had been Sylvia's cat. "I have lost the one living creature to whom I was the most important living being." In 1981 Aurelia still missed her cat and lets us know what else in life she had lost and valued: "Oh, Sappho, if only you were  here to pet, to make happy, have you lick my hand, my cheek & stretch out before the fire in blissful contentment -- greet me when I return home. Something to love and be trusted and loved by!" 

It Is a Truth Universally Acknowledged

Aurelia Plath (nee Schober) as a senior in college wrote a paper for her "English Novel" course about Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Dated December 12, 1927, and graded B-plus/A, it is in the Plath Family Papers at Beinecke Library at Yale, along with Aurelia's copy of the book.

Aurelia later noted in blue ink on its title page:

Reviewed in 1983. I'd use another term for the word "fools" today, otherwise a good paper. 

This is the only college paper of hers Aurelia preserved in her personal files. Carefully I unfolded and read it, keeping the pages open with weights as one does in rare book and manuscript rooms. On the first page her professor wrote a suggestion in red pencil. I tried to decipher it. Does it say "Figur?"

Rather than ask you to read the photo, I transcribed the page's text, below: 

[Begin]

"She (Jane Austen) had the fatal gift of observation, which is possibly the rarest gift of all, and where once a foible showed under her eye, she could not help noting it to her reader: it did not matter that she love [sic] and honored the character where she found it."  -William Dean Howells

With keen perception and unerring accuracy the realist, Jane Austen, depicted characters that moved upon the little provincial stage where she lived her own part. It was a narrow stage, whereon the chief business of its people "was attention to social duties: and their chief interest was matrimony."*

With a masterly hand Miss Austen selected a motley group of fools. Two individuals of her selection were endowed with superior mentalities, were destined to irresistibly attract each other; therefore to render the play more fascinating, Jane Austen imbued them with pride and prejudice: then, with an ironic smile partially withdrew and watched them act their parts. While she never actually stepped forward upon her stage to comment upon a player's art, yet the reader is conscious that she was standing in the wings, ironically smiling at blunders, silently applauding the rapier-like thrusts of her favorite's clever tongue, and nodding approval as good, cynical . . . .

 *Moody and Lovett

I'd have graded this paper a B-minus or a C because it draws solely on ideas presented in the book's introduction by novelist William Dean Howells. Nothing in the paper sounds original. We know from her master's thesis and her college diary that Aurelia could write much better than she did here. In Aurelia's copy of the book, only the introduction has underlinings, made with a fountain pen.

One would say that like most college students Aurelia was probably in a rush and tasked over the weekend with writing papers for her other courses. So she got the novel, read its introduction, and bingo. The sly little minx. Research, as usual, fleshes out the story:

In October Aurelia slipped and fell down the staircase in her dormitory, breaking her ankle, and was taken to Boston's Homeopathic Hospital. We know which hospital because her boyfriend Karl Terzaghi's diary says he sat at her bedside and held her hand. Karl's later diary entry of December 4, 1927, says Aurelia "still needs her crutches." The top student in her class of 1928, candidate for valedictorian, Aurelia had lost at least a week or two of coursework in six courses, and missed lectures and discussion. She was also in pain and hobbling around. Grade-wise, it could have cost her unless she caught up.

The day after her date with Karl, Aurelia bought, signed, and dated her copy of the novel: December 5, 1927, a Monday. She turned in her Austen paper the following Monday.

So like some college students (but never you or I) Aurelia took the easy way out by reading the introduction and padding out her assignment, maybe paging through the novel or reading its final page, as do some students (never you or I) who say they had no time to read the book or write the assignment because they had been away at their grandmother's funeral.

But Aurelia fell down the stairs into the dormitory's lobby, landing among students and staff, and when she walked with crutches everyone including her professors knew why. 

As her prof, I would have raised the grade on this paper from C or B-minus to "B," because things happen. Aurelia was a little bit special and showed some grit. Her real professor either showed a higher order of charity or was up late with a red pencil reading 40 or 60 other papers.

I Get Invited to an Academic Conference

My first glimpse of Beinecke Library

 

Me to My Sister: I was invited to give a paper at an academic conference in [expensive city].  I’ve never been there and I have a really good friend there

 

Sister: Sounds nice

 

Me: I’m not sure I can swing it financially

 

Sister: How much are they paying you

 

Me: I don’t get paid. It’s a career thing

 

Sister: If they invited you, they should pay you

 

Me: It doesn’t work that way. I pay them

 

Sister: You do?

 

Me: There’s a $350 registration fee and that gets me a group discount at a hotel but hotels are like $250 a night there, and I’d have to stay two nights at least and maybe three because my friend wants to show me around the city. I’ve always wanted to go there

 

Sister: Can’t you stay with your friend

 

Me: She has a roommate who sleeps on the couch. Rents are so expensive there

 

Sister: Well at least they pay for your plane ticket?

 

Me: No, they don’t do that

 

Sister: Then why would you go

 

Me: It’s kind of an honor to be invited, they’re really interested my research and I’d meet other scholars who do similar topics and hear what they’re researching, and maybe get my name out there and make some friends who work at universities who might tell other professors in the field what I’m doing or at least that work is being done. That’s the value of it. Plus I could put it on my resume. I figure it will cost about $2000 with food and rides to and from the airport

 

Sister: They don’t even feed you

 

Me: We get one lunch

 

Sister: 

 

Me: Guess I shouldn’t go, should save the money to do research at Yale

The Most Popular Plath Posts of 2025

Aurelia Plath in this note is outraged that the Smith College infirmary in 1951 gave Sylvia Plath sleeping pills (the two words Aurelia wrote in Gregg shorthand).

Of 2025's total of 44 AureliaPlath.info posts most readers favored the posts I favored, of primary materials and new connections made. I thought I was weird to be obsessed for a week with Sylvia Plath's hairbands and hair ribbons but wrote about them anyway and readers were interested! Sylvia's many mentions of sleeping pills and "phenobarbs," drugs she used to try to kill herself, I had never seen listed or tracked, so I did that. I am glad that readers saw value in that post and hope some might consider further research into Sylvia Plath and drugs.

Having forced myself to read the three books about Assia Wevill now in print (all by U.S. scholar Dr. Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, whom I met in December) I linked Aurelia with Assia for the very first time. They met at Court Green in 1967, really liked each other, and exchanged several letters.

This year's big Plath news was the Plath Family Papers opening for research at Yale University's Beinecke Library. The day before the archive officially opened I was there and also for the next entire workweek, mostly reading Aurelia's diaries, begun with hope in 1924 and ending in 1990. And the Plath and Greenwood heirloom family photographs, stunning and unique, open a casement window into Sylvia's paternal and maternal ancestry and give faces to names.

My fiercest thanks to readers who donated funds for transportation to, from, and within the city of New Haven, Connecticut.

I'm honored that you follow AureliaPlath.info. Despite the many advantages of blogspot.com I became aware this year that it's viewed as a hobbyist's platform, and passion for Plath is too important to keep siloed. So in 2026 I plan to join the bigger league of Substack. Most articles there are free to read. I will keep you informed.

Readers' favorites in 2025:

"I Am the Jew" (January)

"Sylvia Plath and Sleeping Pills" (January) 

"Sylvia Plath and Phyllis McGinley" (March)

"Sylvia Plath's Hair Ribbons and Hairbands" (June)  

"Pleased With Everything: The Plath Family Papers at Yale" (July) 

"Sylvia Died Yesterday" (August) 

"Aurelia Plath and Assia Wevill: Tight Wires Between Them" (October) 

Images from the Plath Family Papers

Aurelia Plath's last diary. These pages from 1989 show variations in Aurelia's handwriting as she struggled with macular degeneration. Emotionally she has just been knocked sidewise after reading the new Plath biography Bitter Fame. 

On the leftward page she noted "Nov. 10 The OPENING OF THE WALL Between East and West Germany! Is light coming to this part of the world as I continually lose my sight?" Just above that, a late-in-life realization: "I should have worked for my own 'career.' Regret so not accepting the 'Dean of Women' post at Northeastern. Bleeding ulcers were still with me then." Young Sylvia had also guilt-tripped Aurelia about taking that job, saying, "For your own self-aggrandizement you would leave us complete orphans!" On the rightward page, on November 12 "(Full Moon!)" Aurelia and her neighbor, financial professional Bill Cruickshank, worked on her accounts until 5:30 p.m. "Think Positive!" she told herself, and under November 17 wrote a catty little note about "uneducated" Dido Merwin, whose searing short memoir about Sylvia is appended to Bitter Fame.

The baby is Aurelia's sister Dorothy, born in May 1911. Aurelia is on the right. They are with their mother Aurelia Greenwood Schober. If the photo is from 1911, Aurelia was five and her mother 23.

The label on this palm-sized diary says "1962 - Catastrophe at Court Green." During the week Ted and Sylvia's marriage fell apart their houseguest Aurelia kept quiet, tended her grandchildren, and wrote in this diary very little of consequence. On July 11 Sylvia shut herself away to write a novel and Aurelia served her dinner in the study. No further details. You'd never know except by reading a later diary that during that week Sylvia angrily told Aurelia, "You are of no use to me here!" and ordered her to move out. The only trace of that in the 1962 diary is a page with names and phone numbers of nearby hotels. It was midsummer and hotels were all booked. Housed with midwife Winifred Davies, Aurelia passed the time reading a book of home remedies, copying out numerous uses of cider vinegar. (I'm not making that up.) Invited back to Court Green a few days later, Aurelia recorded in Gregg shorthand that Sylvia, unable to sleep, eat, or care for her children was sedated by the local doctor. 

The above is the older of two diaries Aurelia definitively censored, this one by ripping out pages and noting, "Tore out all the sad notes made from 1936-40." Wish she hadn't. The other injured diary has several pages from autumn 1958 razored out. Letters from Sylvia hint that was a period of conflict having nothing to do with Sylvia: Aurelia was fighting with her siblings.

A frank and lengthy discussion about reading Aurelia Plath's diaries is free at Substack.

I Hoped This Was Aurelia Plath's Poem

Before she married Otto Plath, Aurelia Schober wrote poetry and fiction. Two published poems survive: one from her high-school days and one from college. This poem was in the folder with her first diary, 1924-28, in the Plath Family Papers at Yale University.

I'd gone to see those papers hoping to find Aurelia kept notebooks full of her poems. We could compare with Edna St. Vincent Millay's or Sara Teasdale's -- the top female poets of the time, and Aurelia owned their books. And maybe consider how Aurelia's poems might relate to her daughter Sylvia's poems. Oh, I hoped this poem was Aurelia's, until I read it.

I thought if Aurelia preserved this poem it was hers, but "A.C.M." is credited and her initials then were "A.F.S." Today most poets want credit for their poems but for some reason A.C.M. lay low. Maybe the reason was modesty. Aurelia attended a women's college and its yearbooks 1926 through 1928 each devote pages to creative writings, all unsigned. Much later, Aurelia identified her own poem "A Child's Wish" in the 1928 yearbook [1], but the typeface here matches that of Winthrop High School's yearbook and Aurelia graduated from there in '24. 

This rough-hewn poem lacks the formal polish of Aurelia's "Forbidden Fruit" (1923; she was seventeen), which she had credited to her and it is reproduced here. Call it "banal" but I like it and it's better than "Bits of Gold." The issue then is why Aurelia kept this clipping. Possibly it was a student's very early work, like, "Ode on an Ag'd Vase."

Aurelia had no classmates with the initials A.C.M. Whoever the author was I hope that like Sylvia they kept writing poems until they got the knack.

[1] Aurelia photocopied "A Child's Wish" for researcher Harriet Rosenstein c. 1970 but it seems Rosenstein did not receive it and it is with other materials in Aurelia Plath's papers at Smith College Libraries.

I Was Playing Paper Dolls

Aurelia in Sarasota, Florida, Easter 1967

Early in the Plath Family Papers research I saw I’d been working with paper dolls and of course I had, because between Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Aurelia Plath and I there had never been anything but paper. 

Although they had been real living people, what I’d read determined the faces I gave them and how I clothed them. Gwyneth Paltrow in the movie Sylvia wore upper-middle-class clothes, as if the costumers never met anyone like Sylvia Plath who bought off the rack aspirational clothes not quite so expensive or  flattering. And a whole generation now thinks Sylvia had blue eyes when they were plain common brown. 

That only proved that Sylvia imagined is not a person with an eye color. She is a cutout to be costumed: The Marilyn Monroe of literature, if you like. A feminist. A mystic. Political. Suicidal Esther Greenwood. Clothe her however you want. And instead of outgrowing our Sylvia Plath paper doll we got farther and farther away from the doll and deeper into the paper. Thinking Sylvia is her paper we generate more paper arguing whether paper equals truth. Any eight-year-old can tell you that’s a misapprehension.

In the new Plath Family archives I’m at my keyboard as at a sewing machine upstyling some old togs papered onto Sylvia, Ted, and Otto -- they're all in the archive -- and trying to craft for Aurelia a face and presence I am now privileged to see. Reading Aurelia's diaries and the lists of hundreds of friends in her bursting address book and seeing notes and inks and photos she cherished I felt as if her live warm body was stirring and arose as after a long sleep. She is more alive, more colorful and collected, more Queen Elizabeth II, than the Aurelia on whose life I thought myself an expert.