The Rosenstein Papers

This month, I’ll be teaching a four week course on the Harriet Rosenstein papers, as part of Stockton University’s Institute for Lifelong Learning. The course costs $45. It is totally online, and will take place June 7, 14, 21, & 28 at 2:00 pm EST. You can register here.

I wanted to write briefly about what the Rosenstein papers are, about who Harriet Rosenstein was, about why— to me— her story matters as much as it does to Sylvia Plath studies. In my mind, the re-entry of Harriet Rosenstein’s archive into Sylvia Plath’s story is partially responsible for my own re-entry into that same story, so it’s all very tangled. Untangling it has become, to my surprise, a major part of Loving Sylvia Plath.

In April of 2017, an article in the British newspaper The Guardian announced that an antiquarian bookseller had put a small archive of previously unseen Plath papers for sale. These supposedly included her psychiatric records from McLean Hospital, where she spent four months after her suicide attempt in 1953, and 14 letters to her therapist-turned-confidante, who she met while being treated at McLean— Dr. Ruth Barnhouse Beuscher, the inspiration for Dr. Nolan, in The Bell Jar, Sylvia’s only published novel. The article said these were part of an archive from a “putative” biographer named Harriet Rosenstein, who had never completed her manuscript.

At the time, I was mostly frustrated by the tenor of the discussion surrounding the letters to Dr. Beuscher. They allegedly claimed that Hughes had been physically violent with Plath, even causing her to miscarry their second child. The article in The Guardian was constructed to cast aspersion on Plath’s word, making it out as though she was a known liar— despite the irony that in it, the author Danuta Kean made multiple errors about both Plath and Hughes which could easily have been fact-checked.

But by then, I was used to this sort of thing, as Plath wrote in her famous poem “Edge.” People said what they wanted about Sylvia. Her myth remained bigger than her lived existence. It was garbage, but there it was. I closed my computer, seething, and went to bed. A few days later, I wrote an article about our culture’s refusal to take Sylvia Plath at her word, thinking no one would read it. No one would care.

There is a moment in Janet Malcolm’s famous book on Plath and Hughes, The Silent Woman, when she says of the Plath-Hughes debacle, “I entered the fray.” Looking back, I guess the writing of that article is when, unwittingly, I did exactly that. I had always known, reading about Sylvia, that I was being lied to, and here was the proof. I had come across Harriet Rosenstein’s name, what— once? twice? in all my years reading everything I could get my hands on about Sylvia Plath. Once, in a throwaway reference about people writing about Plath and her mother in The Silent Woman; once, when I read Rosenstein’s article on Plath in an old issue of Ms. magazine. I thought she was a scholar who just wrote one thing on Plath and moved on with her life. Now, it turned out, she had been sitting on the most valuable Plath materials we had seen in… I don’t know, maybe ever?

In any case, the article published and, as it turned out, people cared. Lots of them. It led to more articles and then, a book deal.

More than a year would pass, after that, until I was able to read the “Beuscher Letters” in their entirety— in the ensuing time, Smith College, which owns not only a large Plath archive, but also the papers of Ruth Beuscher, sued Rosenstein, claiming the letters belonged to them, halting any sale to a private collector. Eventually, Smith won the right to keep them in their library, but the copyright fell to Frieda Hughes, Sylvia’s daughter and heir. She agreed to have them included in the second volume of her mother’s letters, which was then forthcoming. Her introduction to this volume is a moving— is somewhat problematic— discussion of the letters and her mother’s legacy.

In the meantime, I began to ask my Plath people— who was Harriet Rosenstein? I mean, you know— who was she, really?

No one really seemed to know. People were aware that she had begun a biography of Plath which was based on her dissertation at Brandeis University— a “critical biography,” or one that was steeped in literary criticism of Plath’s work. She never finished it, and then… that was that. She lived in Massachusetts, still. She was apparently a social worker.

Imagine, then, my further shock when, in January 2020, just weeks before the world turned upside down, it was announced that Rosenstein’s full archive had been sold to Emory University. The archive included never-before-seen letters Plath had written to Elizabeth Sigmund, just a week before her death; articles she had written, letters between Rosenstein and many of Plath’s closest friends, and— this was the really amazing thing— reels and reels of audio tapes of her interviews with the same: W.S. Merwin, Ruth Beuscher, Suzette Macedo, Nancy Hunter Steiner, Clarissa Roche, Gordon Lameyer… the list just went on. I began making hasty plans to visit Atlanta again, but then, the ever-miraculous Peter Steinberg asked several Plath scholars, me included, if we wanted to pay a photographer to capture images of the archive in its entirety, which we could then keep on our computers.

The answer was obviously yes— and since then, I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole. Who Harriet Rosenstein was, and why she never finished this book, have become a secondary thread of Loving Sylvia Plath. Part of the book has always been the ways the stories of Plath’s scholars and fans intertwine with Plath’s story, but this is, if you’ll permit me, some next level shit. The audio tapes reveal hours upon hours of Rosenstein cozying up with Sylvia’s nearest and dearest, with them telling Rosenstein everything they can remember in the warm tones of friendship, in many cases as though Harriet is— I’ll just say it— a proxy for their lost friend. One letter says exactly this.

The letters and tapes are a literal time capsule. If it’s not enough to hear Clarissa Roche tell her young son to “go off to the shop for some ciggies, darling, Benson & Hedges, but put something round your throat,” then enjoy a THIRTY MINUTE DISCOURSE between Rosenstein and an unknown conversationalist about Plath-as-Scorpio and horoscope casting, which is the second half of the tape of her interview with W.S. Merwin. She also tells this nameless friend, “He asked if I’d talked to Adrienne Rich and I said, Yeah, ‘course I had, you know, and he said…” *cue me hitting the pause button and frantically searching for her interview with ACR* (it doesn’t exist, or if it does, it’s not included in the archive). Harriet Rosenstein was, to borrow Carl Rollyson’s word, intrepid. She got the goddamn scoop. You hear people say things in these interviews that never once made it to a biography previous to Heather Clark’s Red Comet, and in some cases, not even then. It is no stretch to say that, had her book seen the light of day, we would know a very different Sylvia Plath from the one we know now.

So, why didn’t it?

This is one of the questions I’ll pose, and attempt to answer, in this course. So if you have the means, please join us for a jaunt back in time to a world where kids fetched cigs, Sylvia was a witch, and horoscopes were considered a legitimate form of scholarly inquiry. It’s a wild ride. Climb on board.