Primary Materials About Aurelia Plath

Seeking primary materials by and about Aurelia Plath, I've learned:

1) Sylvia Plath is said to have burned all her mother's letters to her ("upward of a thousand") in a bonfire in Devon in 1962. Only ten survive in the archives at Lilly Library at Indiana University and at Smith College. One interesting item is a Christmas card Sylvia kept in her purse, given by Ted to Warren and Maggie Plath at the time of Sylvia's funeral in 1963. Bridget Anna Lowe unearthed its story and wrote about it in Plath Profiles 5: Summer 2012.
2) There is no Aurelia Plath archive.
3) The JSTOR database lists no scholarly articles about Aurelia Plath. One unpublished thesis, "The influence of Aurelia Plath on Sylvia Plath: an interpretative biography," was written in 1977.
4) Aurelia kept her own journals, but they are not in any archive.
5) Aurelia's post-1977 letters are at Smith College; the ones actually sent to Ted Hughes are at Emory, although some drafts and carbons are at the Lilly Library.
6) Chief among Aurelia's primary materials is Letters Home, of course, but according to a review of Lessons from the Archive: Sylvia Plath and The Politics of Memory in Feminist Studies (Vol. 31, No. 3, 2005), "the full text of Aurelia Plath's intended introduction has not been published." That is true! Omitted is an anecdote about young Sylvia's sense of humor, and a passage saying the Plath children's questions about sex were always honestly answered and discussed. Lilly Library and Smith hold original and revised Letters Home typescripts.
7) Aurelia was interviewed by journalists and at least two filmmakers. At Washington University I found and copied an interview that was listed but had not been digitized: "Sylvia Plath's Letters Home: Some Reflections by Her Mother," by Robert Robertson in The Listener, Vol. 95, 1976, p. 515. In it Aurelia describes watching Sylvia build a bonfire and burning her second novel and "much else." This contradicts what The Other Ariel (page 57) says: "Aurelia Plath, visiting her daughter from June 21 to August 3, leaves no account of the incident immortalized by the poem ["Burning the Letters"].
8) Aurelia Plath's "Letter in the Actuality of Spring," in Ariel Ascending (1985), edited by Paul Alexander (pp. 214-217) is called an essay, but a footnote explains it's an excerpt from a letter. Alexander provided the title and received Aurelia's permission to print it as an essay.

"Aurelia Plath Had No Self"

From Salon.com, 2000, in an article called "The Real Sylvia Plath," by novelist Kate Moses:

"Aurelia Plath had no self; she lived for and through her children. From Sylvia Plath’s infancy, her primary parent’s selflessness gave Plath no model for a self that could maintain its autonomy or exist beyond meeting other people’s needs. What Plath had instead was one big boundariless, free-floating ego, a self utterly dependent on the inflation by the selfless parent, and all psychic roads, ultimately, led right back to Sylvia. Plath spent her entire adult life trying to trace the ego boundaries for herself that her mother neglected to impose."

Moses is a novelist, not a journalist. The novelist deals in fiction, the journalist in facts. Salon.com, as a journalistic venue, should have asked if Moses could prove her assertions that:

• Aurelia had no self?
• although Aurelia worked part-time from January 1941 to 1942, and full-time from 1942 to 1970, she lived for and through her children?
• she "gave Sylvia no model for a self that could maintain its autonomy or exist beyond meeting other people's needs"? (How can anyone ever know what what Aurelia didn't give?)
• Sylvia "spent her entire adult life trying to trace her ego boundaries"? That's obvious exaggeration. And when, precisely, did Sylvia's adulthood begin?

Aurelia and also Sylvia ('like an empty vessel") are treated in this article and others as if they were fictional characters who can be outfitted with motives and judged without facts. I call this "emo-scholarship." Hugh Kenner, contributor to Modern Critical Views: Sylvia Plath (1989), calls it "parlor psychiatry" (page 68).

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.

Aurelia Plath and Shorthand's Evolution

The Gregg Shorthand Manual Simplified, second edition (1955) arrived in the mail today, and will be used to sharpen my shorthand transcription skills before I visit the Sylvia Plath archives at the University of Indiana. Aurelia Plath made shorthand and longhand annotations on her famous daughter’s letters and books. Although Plath scholars are many and avid, no scholar has ever transcribed the shorthand annotations. That is up to me and I accept the challenge.

The version of Gregg shorthand Aurelia learned depends on when she learned it, and that is not yet known. The first Gregg shorthand textbook, a pamphlet titled Light Line Phonography: The Phonetic Handwriting (1888) was published in England by John Robert Gregg in an edition of 500 copies, and in the U.S. in 1898 as a book, Gregg’s Shorthand Manual. Succeeding editions presented refinements—the 1929 edition is the most lauded—but the 1949 edition had a new title: Gregg Shorthand Manual Simplified. “Simplified” emphasized speed and accurate transcription. All earlier versions of Gregg shorthand are called “pre-Simplified.” The 1949 version would have appeared during Aurelia Plath's business-school teaching career, when she was 43.

I was taught from the eighth edition, called the Diamond Jubilee Series (1963-1977), edited to “make shorthand easier to learn.” Even so it wasn’t easy to learn: in high school I studied it for two years.

The Gregg shorthand versions Aurelia learned or taught await discovery. But last autumn in Sylvia’s archives I saw and read Aurelia’s annotations (they are of textbook quality) and think that they will be of interest when transcribed.

What The Bell Jar Says About Shorthand

I am taking an online refresher course in Gregg shorthand to prepare for my week in the Sylvia Plath archive, seeking and transcribing Aurelia Plath's shorthand notations on Sylvia's books and correspondence. I did Lesson 2 today. Gregg shorthand is a unique and graceful written language, with parallels to, and a learning curve similar to, cursive writing. But it'd be hard to convince two generations of Plath scholars that shorthand has any value, because Sylvia, in her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, wrote dismissively about it. Her stand-in character Esther Greenwood, age 19, decides against learning shorthand from her mother, a business-college teacher, during the lowest point of her young life, the summer of 1953.

For the record, The Bell Jar's mentions of shorthand are quoted here. Page numbers correspond to the Bantam paperback edition, published in the U.S. in 1972:

My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us ever since my father died. . . .She was always on to me to learn shorthand after college, so I'd have a practical skill as well as a college degree. [32]


I started adding up all the things I couldn't do.

I began with cooking. . . .

I didn't know shorthand either.

This meant I couldn't get a good job after college. My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand was something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter.

The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters. Besides, those little shorthand symbols in the book my mother showed me seemed just as bad as let t equal time and let s equal the total distance. [61-62]


My mother was teaching shorthand and typing to a lot of city college girls and wouldn't be home till the middle of the afternoon. [94]


By the end of supper my mother had convinced me I should study shorthand in the evenings. Then I would be killing two birds with one stone, writing a novel and learning something practical as well. I would also be saving a whole lot of money.

That same evening, my mother unearthed an old blackboard from the cellar and set it up on the breezeway. Then she stood at the blackboard and scribbled little curlicues in white chalk while I sat in a chair and watched.

At first I felt hopeful.

I thought I might learn shorthand in no time, and when the freckled lady in the Scholarships office asked me why I hadn't worked to earn money in July and August, the way you were supposed to if you were a scholarship girl, I could tell her I had taken a free shorthand course instead, so I could support myself right after college.

The only thing was, when I tried to picture myself in some job, briskly jotting down line after line of shorthand, my mind went blank. There wasn't one job I felt like doing where you used shorthand. And, as I sat there and watched, the white chalk curlicues blurred into senselessness.

I told my mother I had a terrible headache, and went to bed.

An hour later the door inched open, and as she crept into the room I heard the whisper of her clothes as she undressed. She climbed into bed. Then her breathing grew slow and regular.

In the dim light of the streetlamp that filtered through the drawn blinds, I could see the pin curls on her head glittering like a row of little bayonets.

I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it. [99-100].


I thought I'd better go to work for a year and think things over. Maybe I could study the eighteenth century in secret.

But I didn't know shorthand, so what could I do?

I could be a waitress or a typist.

But I couldn't stand the idea of being either one. [103]