Aurelia Plath

Aurelia Frances Plath (née Schober; April 26, 1906 – March 11, 1994) was the wife of Otto Emil Plath, the mother of the American poet Sylvia Plath, and her brother Warren, and the grandmother of Frieda Rebecca Hughes and Nicholas Farrar Hughes.

Aurelia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Franz (Frank) Schober of Bad Aussee, Styria, and his wife Aurelia Grünwald (Greenwood). She grew up in Winthrop, Massachusetts.

In 1928, Schober graduated with a Bachelor of Secretarial Sciences (B.S.S.) degree from Boston University’s Practical College of Arts and Letters, a school that prepared women for secretarial careers. Plath married Otto Plath in 1932 and subsequently gave birth to daughter Sylvia in the same year and son Warren in 1935. By 1940, she became a widow. To support her children, Mrs. Plath took a job teaching shorthand and other secretarial skills at the same college she had graduated from. Mrs. Plath worked there until her forced retirement in 1971.[1]

Sylvia Plath made reference to her grandmother by making "Esther Greenwood" the name of the heroine in her 1963 semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. The relationship between Plath and her daughter was a rather problematic and ambiguous one, for on the one hand they were exceptionally close to each other, and on the other hand Sylvia Plath often claimed that she hated her mother. Their relationship is portrayed in Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar, and in the poem Medusa.

In 1975, Plath published her daughter's letters from 1950-1963 as Letters Home. Plath died, aged 87, of complications from Alzheimer's disease in Needham, Massachusetts.[2]