Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse (October 23, 1923 – May 5, 1999), also known by her married name Ruth Beuscher, was a psychiatrist, theologian, and Episcopal priest. Best known for being the psychiatrist of Sylvia Plath, she corresponded with her since they met at McLean Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts following Plath’s breakdown in 1953. Though Barnhouse destroyed most of their letters, fourteen from Plath to Barnhouse remain (not including the two from Barnhouse to Plath in the Sylvia Plath papers at Smith College).

Early Life

Barnhouse was born in Grenoble, France in 1923, but moved to Philadelphia at the age of two so that her father, a fundamentalist minister, could take up a teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania. She was homeschooled by her grandmother Tiffany, a distant cousin of the founders of Tiffany & Co. With an IQ of 220, she was accepted to Vassar College at fourteen but was not allowed to enroll until she turned sixteen. In the meantime, she met her first husband, Francis Edmonds, at a religious retreat, and eloped with him after her father forbade them from marrying. Less than one month after the elopement, she regretted her marriage but was hesitant to leave because she was pregnant. At twenty-one, she enrolled at Barnard College, where she completed her Bachelor’s Degree, and continued on to Columbia University Medical School, where she earned a medical degree.Towards the end of her first year at Barnard, she divorced Edmonds and gave up most of her custody of the two children she had had with him. She rekindled a relationship only with her daughter, when she was in college. Divorce and child custody were topics she would later discuss in her letters to Plath.

Following her divorce from her first husband, she met William Beuscher, her peer at Columbia who, like Barnhouse, would go on to complete a residency in psychiatry at McLean. She married him and had five more children, but she later divorced him, citing emotional abuse and alcoholism.

While still a full-time psychiatrist and mother, Barnhouse became involved in the Episcopal church in her town. She enrolled part-time at the Weston College of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and became a full-time resident in 1973 on track to obtain a Master’s degree in theology. However, after the Episcopal Church allowed the ordination of women in 1976, she was ordained a deacon in 1978 and a priest in 1980. She then taught at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology.  

Sylvia Plath Correspondence

In 1953, when she was a resident psychiatrist at McLean hospital, she developed a relationship with a college-aged Plath. Later, when Plath published The Bell Jar, Barnhouse was reincarnated as the character Dr. Nolan, the protagonist’s psychiatrist during her stay at a mental hospital. According to Barnhouse, Plath was one of her first patients. They would stay in touch long after Plath left McLean, up until one week before Plath’s death.

At the beginning of the fourteen letters at Smith College, Plath discusses her pregnancies and her and husband Ted Hughes’s writing careers, reflecting on how she will sustain her creative life as a mother. The tone becomes less optimistic, however, when she describes her suspicions of Ted’s affair. Barnhouse (though referred to by Plath in her letters as “Dr. Beuscher”) instructs Plath to hire a good lawyer and to bar Ted from her bed and her home.

References

• Sylvia Plath Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, MA http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/smitharchives/manosca142.html
• Alexander, Paul. “The Psychiatrist who Tried to Save Sylvia Plath.” Literary Hub. 23 Oct. 2018. lithub.com. Web. Feb 11. 2019. https://lithub.com/the-psychiatrist-who-tried-to-save-sylvia-plath/
• Maroda, Karen. “Sylvia and Ruth.” Salon. 29 Nov. 2004. salon.com. Web. Feb 11. 2019. https://www.salon.com/2004/11/29/plath_therapist/
•  https://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/sophiasmith/mnsss603.html
• https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/1983/june/the-lady-isa-priest/

Further Reading

• Paul Alexander, Rough Magic
• Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse Papers at Smith College finding aid: Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Special Collections, Northampton, MA (http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/sophiasmith/mnsss603_main.html)
• Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman
• Sylvia Plath Papers at Smith College finding aid: Sylvia Plath Collection, Mortimer Rare Book Collection, Smith College Special Collections, Smith College, Northampton MA (https://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/mortimer/manoscmr31.html)
• Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
• http://sylviaplath.info/
• Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume I, 1940-1956, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil
• Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume II, 1956-1963, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil
• Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil
• Elizabeth Winder, Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953