Sylvia and Marty

Sylvia Plath ’55 and Marcia Brown Stern ’54

Three weeks before she died on July 25, 2012, Marcia (Marty) Brown Stern ’54 sent me a registered letter, which began, “What is enclosed may astonish you.” Indeed it did. The envelope included a draft of “marcia,” an unpublished poem that Sylvia Plath ’55 wrote about their sophomore year together at Smith College in 1951. In the poem, Sylvia described her cherished friend’s cheeks as “appleshining.”

Ten years later, when she was married and living in England, she wrote “The Babysitters” about her 1951 summer together with Marty, babysitting for two families in Swampscott, Massachusetts. Next to this poem in Crossing the Water (Faber, 1971), Marty pasted a photograph of Sylvia with the children in her care. Sylvia wonders at the end of the poem: “What keyhole have we slipped through, what door has shut? / The shadows of the grasses inched round like hands of a clock, / And from our opposite continents we wave and call. / Everything has happened.”

Marty was also the model for Jody in Plath's novel, The Bell Jar (Heinemann, 1963).This time, in prose, Sylvia described Jody with cheeks that “bloomed like good apples.” Marty wrote “No—” next to this description in her copy of the American edition, which is now part of the Sylvia Plath Collection at Smith College along with an inscribed copy of The Colossus (Heinemann, 1960), Plath’s first book of poems, and 21 original letters.