Sylvia Plath: A Biography Read Online Free PDF Page B

mother would not return from the hospital. Her letters to Aurelia during her hospitalization show clearly that she thought if she were “good,” her mother would return. She lists her “good-girl” behavior: she has practiced the piano, she has bought a homecoming present for Aurelia, she has walked to school with Warren and “defended” him from his schoolmates.
    In July of 1943 Aurelia had a second hemorrhage. This time she arranged for Sylvia to spend a month at Scout camp, and for Warren to spend the time with Aunt Dot. Sylvia, not yet eleven, had never been away from family before. She wrote to Aurelia that she missed her terribly. And on July 18, nearly two weeks into her month’s stay, she feels very sorry for herself: “ All the girls in my tent are going home tomorrow so I feel left out. I didn’t get a letter from you yesterday, I hope you are all right....” Many of Sylvia’s letters are full of bravado. Others include news she knows will please her family — that she has been frugal, conscientious, and that she has been writing. Sometimes this kind of pleasing is combined with accounts of the prodigious amounts of food she has eaten. Perhaps she is trying to gain weight; more likely she is trying to justify the cost of going to camp. Money seems to have been a constant concern, with amounts spent itemized and discussed (“I have washed: 2 pairs of socks, 1 face cloth, 1 jersey, and 1 pair of pants. I have spent about 450 on laundry, about 200 on fruit”). Near the time of her return, she wrote her mother that there have been great changes in her “caracter” and that she hopes they can go to bed at the same time some night so that she can share her camp stories with Aurelia.
    The Plath and Schober families had moved to 26 Elmwood Road in Wellesley, a house described in Sylvia’s photo album as “our little white house” and “our cozy white house.” Compared to many of the larger homes in the neighborhood, the house might have seemed smaller than it was. With its center entrance, it had a living room to the right, dining room to the left, a kitchen, a bedroom, and a screened-in porch downstairs, and two large bedrooms and a bath upstairs. Built on a half-acre corner lot edged with trees, it was comparable to many of the houses in the Wellesley Fells division. Sylvia often read and wrote perched in the branches of the apple tree in the front yard.
    While it was smaller than their Winthrop house, 26 Elmwood Road provided adequate space for the family of five. The living room was large enough for the upright piano; the dining room served as the family gathering place, its walls decorated with the children’s artwork. The only problem with the home, from Sylvia’s point of view, was the fact that her mother shared her bedroom. The larger of the two upstairs rooms, Sylvia’s was furnished with her grandmother’s antique desk, [1] a vanity, chairs, a wooden storage trunk, and twin beds. It was, in fact, larger than her friends’ bedrooms, larger than the Plath living room. Nevertheless, careful as her mother was to use the room “for sleeping purposes only,” the situation was far from ideal. And it continued from the time they moved into the house in 1942 until Warren left for Exeter in 1949. Whenever he was gone, Aurelia slept in his room. For a child who already felt keen pressure to perform, to excel in everything she did, sharing a room with a parent was probably not easy.
    Exciting as moving to Wellesley may have been for the family as a whole, the children had reservations about the change. They loved their Johnson Avenue house, especially the large enclosed porch, which Otto had used as his study. The house had been the scene of many of her school triumphs, and it is the house she lamented leaving in her poem “Let the Rain Fall Gently,” written when she was fifteen.
    After five years of being inseparable from her friends David and Ruth Freeman, Sylvia hated to leave them. She also