On October 1 she left London for Cambridge by train. From the Cambridge station, with her massive trunk in tow, she made her way to Whitstead, a building on the Barton Road that housed twelve foreign Newnham College students. She found Whitstead’s white stone walls, red-tiled roof, small yard, and resident ravens quaint. The Scottish housekeeper, Mrs. Milne, showed her up to her “atticish” room on the third floor, which she immediately decided would make a cozy writer’s garret.13 Over the next few weeks, she decorated her room with two enormous bookcases, a tea set she had ordered in London, an oblong walnut coffee table, fresh fruit, handmade rush mats, brightly colored pillows, and “great bouquets of Van-Gogh-type yellow chrysanthemums, vivid postcard reprints of Picasso…candles in wine bottles.”14 The room was full of yellows, holly greens, chestnut browns, and accents of black and white. Plath created a haven where she could proudly hold small “salons”—“as yet, all is poised on the threshold, expectant, tantalizing, about to begin,” she wrote home.15
Although she described her new digs enthusiastically in letters, she hinted at the shortcoming that would later stand for all that was wrong with England: there was no central heating at Whitstead. It was only October, yet her room was “cool enough to keep butter and milk in (!)” and she could see her breath “in frosty clouds” each morning in the bathroom.16 She told Aurelia that “the damp here is continuous.”17 To keep warm, she put a shilling in a small gas fireplace, which, she told Marcia, “scalds the side nearest it & leaves the other as cold as the back of the moon.”18 By February, Sylvia would wear gloves while typing, but she would still feel “an intense pain” when she tried to bend her freezing fingers. Each night she took a hot-water bottle to bed, and wore wool socks and sweaters over her flannel pajamas. Mornings were excruciating—she had never experienced “such cold” as she hacked a thin layer of ice off her windows “to make a kind of porthole so I could see out.”19 Plath was not overdramatizing; the biting cold that winter was a ubiquitous theme in other Whitstead residents’ memoirs.20 Indeed, Whitstead itself was so cold that there was no need for a refrigerator—all food was kept in the buttery.21 Two of the wealthier girls bought oil heaters for their rooms. Jean Gooder, who graduated from Newnham with a BA in English in 1956, remembered the “dismalness” of those years: “you’d use your gown as a draft blocker at the bottom of the door….Rooms were spartan, meals were terrible, rationing went on until 1953. There were no pleasures.”22
Still, there was a window-seat sofa Sylvia could “curl up in and read with a fine view of tree-tops,” and a gas ring where she could make tea.23 Eventually, she managed three-course dinners—sherry, salad, steak, wine, and fruit compote—on the small stove. It was a skill born of necessity, for she found the food served in Newnham’s dining hall—whose “ornate white woodwork” made her feel as if she were “sitting inside of a frosted wedding cake”—bland and full of starch.24 Breakfasts at Whitstead consisted mainly of fried bread and scrambled eggs from powder. There were not even paper napkins because of a postwar paper shortage. “I am getting used to going around feeling rather sticky and jam-ish!” Sylvia told Aurelia.25
The food in Hall, however, was positively gourmet compared to what she encountered in Newnham’s tiny infirmary when she came down with her annual autumn sinus infection: “No greens, no fresh fruit or red meat!” she wrote home. Sylvia had expected cocaine sprays, penicillin, and wholesome meals like she had received at Smith. “Well, what a rude awakening!” She was given only aspirin and told that no doctor would see her unless she ran a temperature. When she asked the “one stony-hearted and absolutely ‘rule-bound’ nurse” for a Kleenex, the nurse offered to tear up an old sheet: they had no tissues.26 Sylvia walked out after one night, preferring the comforts of her room to “Newnham Hospital.” She ended up seeing a private doctor in town.
Yet for every British inconvenience, it seemed, there was something quaint or traditional that made up for the discomfort. She enjoyed hearing the Latin grace spoken in Hall before each meal, and she was overwhelmed by the selection of tropical fresh fruit “from the colonies” in the town’s open-air market.27 She relished the challenge of biking down narrow cobbled lanes and dodging double-deckers; Cambridge contemporaries remembered the determination and speed with which she cycled.28 She walked to Grantchester through “meadows full of cows and brooding white horses” and took tea by a roaring fire.29 Even the raw weather, which she often described as silver and luminous, had its Gothic charms: “Heavy morning and evening mists make me feel I’m moving about in a ghost-play.”30
Her immersion in British life was complete when, on October 20, she was amazed to find herself in a receiving line for Queen Elizabeth, “within touching distance,” at Newnham.31 (Sylvia’s friend Isabel Murray Henderson remembered that before the visit, “we were all summoned to the main Hall and taught how to curtsey.”)32 Few Americans had the honor of meeting the Queen of England in 1955. This was a major moment for Sylvia, who had worked as a maid, nanny, and waitress. Now she was introduced to royalty. “Oh mother,” Plath wrote, “every alleyway is crowded with tradition, antiquity, and I can feel a peace, reserve, lack of hurry here which has centuries behind it.”33 She was moved by the grand, imposing architecture of the Cambridge colleges; the punts moving luxuriously down the River Cam; the stunning interior of King’s College Chapel; and the quiet backstreets and squares where she rode her bicycle, her black subfusc gown flowing behind her. “A kind of golden promise hovers in the air along the Cam and in the quaint crooked streets,” she wrote home in early October. “I must make my own Cambridge….I have to begin life on all fronts at once again.”34
American, South African, and Scottish students at Whitstead kindly showed Sylvia around town during her first few days, but she was eager to meet more English students—especially English men.35 She was dismayed that there was no new student orientation, as there would have been at an American college. “No official ‘big sisters’ come up to one here…everything here is so lackadaisical and de-centralized,” she told Aurelia.36 Newnham, despite its impressive Queen Anne–style buildings and eighteen acres of grounds and gardens, was a less heavily endowed institution than Smith. It had been founded in 1871 as a house for five female students who wished to audit university lectures, yet it was not until 1948—only seven years before Plath arrived—that women were allowed to take a Cambridge degree. Cambridge would be the last university in Great Britain to extend full equality to its female students.
Women’s colleges at Oxbridge were overshadowed by the men’s colleges. They were poor in comparison, lacking centuries-old endowments and wealthy alumni, and begrudged their place within the larger, all-male university. Their food and lodgings were drastically inferior, as Virginia Woolf famously noted in A Room of One’s Own. Cambridge women were encouraged to focus exclusively on their studies and behave with ladylike decorum. There was no Seven Sisters glamour and little sense of empowered female fellowship—the mood was serious and stoic. Jane Baltzell Kopp, a fellow American and one of Sylvia’s few close friends at Cambridge, claimed that Newnham was not a “supportive community” in the way that Smith had been for Plath—“absolutely not.”37 Jean Gooder, who knew Plath at Newnham and attended the famous party where Plath met Hughes, agreed that students who came from proud American women’s colleges had to adjust their expectations. “I encountered two things for the first time in my first few weeks in Cambridge: anti-feminism and anti-Semitism. Both were a real shock. I don’t mean that they were everywhere but they certainly existed, and Sylvia must have found herself brought up against them too.”38 The bigotry was both invisible and omnipresent.
At Smith, Plath had been the most celebrated student of her year, a celebrity on campus and the pet of the English faculty. But until she met her supervisor Dorothea Krook during her second term, she felt no rapport with any female Newnham dons. She considered them, she told her mother, “such grotesques!” They seemed to he
r straight out of Dickens: she described one as “cadaverous,” another like a “midget.” “They are all very brilliant or learned (quite a different thing) in their specialized ways, but I feel that all their experience is secondary and this to me is tantamount to a kind of living death.”39 In her journal, she wrote, “The men are probably better, but there is no chance of getting them for supervisors, and they are too brilliant to indulge in that friendly commerce which Mr. Fisher, Mr. Kazin and Mr. Gibian were so dear about.”40 Women with PhDs at that time were largely single and childless, like a troupe of academic nuns.
Jean Gooder, who eventually became director of studies at Newnham, remembered, “It was not easy being at a women’s college then. I found it really peculiar to be working only with women, who were comfortable with their situation, formal. There was no give….They never taught us that women had only been admitted to full membership of the university in 1948. They said nothing. They were tame. They were dutiful scholars. They knew their texts and topics, but God where was the interest, where was the chutzpah?” She found the quality of teaching at Newnham low, with the exception of Dorothea Krook, who, she said, “was by far the most interesting teacher.”
Newnham refused Jean and two other friends permission to attend F. R. Leavis’s weekly seminars at Downing College—but they went anyway, the only women in a roomful of male undergraduates. Jean felt lucky to be a part of the seminar, which was much more rigorous than what she experienced at her own college. She had some sympathy for Sylvia’s desire not to be like the female Newnham dons. (“One wouldn’t!”) When Jean went to the Cambridge career services department for advice, they tried to steer her into teaching. She did not want, as she put it, to be “stuck in the education system,” and told them she wanted to join the diplomatic service, or the World Health Organization. “Forget it, you’ll only ever be a secretary” was the response. She ended up spending her career teaching at Newnham, where she helped change the culture to one of strong female fellowship.41
Plath’s revulsion toward the Newnham dons was not entirely due to sexism. She felt the life of an academic was too remote from the living world. “It is often tempting to hide from the blood & guts of life in a neat special subject on paper where one can become an unchallenged expert, but I, like Yeats, would rather say: ‘It was my glory that I had such friends,’ when I finally leave the world.”42 May Collacott Targett remembered that Sylvia had come to Cambridge “wanting to be a star writer rather than an academic expert on English literature.”43 While there were few women academics Sylvia could look to in her search for a life that combined art, marriage, and motherhood, there were female writers who had successfully integrated all three. “Don’t worry that I am a ‘career woman,’ ” she wrote Aurelia that January. “I am definitely meant to be married & have children & a home & write like these women I admire: mrs. moore [Sarah-Elizabeth Rodger], jean stafford, hortense calisher, phyllis mcginley [sic] etc.”44 She had a horror of ending up alone, a “career girl.” In her journal she wrote, “Save me from that, that final wry sour lemon acid in the veins of single clever lonely women.”45
Sylvia, along with her contemporaries, had been socially conditioned to think this way. Dr. Marynia Farnham, the psychiatrist who cowrote the best-selling Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (1947), cautioned that women should hold no “fantasy in her mind about being an ‘independent woman.’ ” Career women, she wrote, pursued their ambition “at terrific cost to themselves and society.” They had “unhappy” children and husbands, who “do not have real women as partners. Instead, their wives have become their rivals.”46 Plath would have absorbed this message in other ways. Cambridge men, it was said, preferred dating the student nurses at the nearby Addenbrooke’s Hospital to the Newnham and Girton bluestockings. (In 1953, the future sociologist Hannah Gavron wrote to a friend while visiting Cambridge, “Newnham is vile, it looks like a gas works and all the men utterly despise Newnham and Girton.”)47 Sylvia overheard snippets of conversations in hall attesting to such preferences: “ ‘I always thought they expected girls to do worse than boys at things….But here, you know, it’s quite the opposite; there’s such a competition for girls to get in the boys are quite terrified of them.’ ”48 The women students may have discussed their intellectual ambitions over tea, but they were not encouraged to question the established hierarchies.
Plath did. As she wrote to her mother in February 1956, “it seems the Victorian age of emancipation is yet dominant here.”49 Sylvia’s Newnham friend Isabel Murray Henderson recalled that the sexism at Cambridge was “more obvious” than what she had experienced at the University of Aberdeen, but that “One had simply to despise the perpetrator and move on.”50 Plath took a harder line. In May 1956, she would publish an article in Oxford’s Isis about sexism at Cambridge:
the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both. Men here are inclined to treat women in one of two ways: either (1) as pretty beagling frivolous things (or devastating bohemian things) worthy of May balls and suggestive looks over bottles of Chablis by candlelight, or, more rarely, (2) as esoteric opponents on an intellectual tennis court where the man, by law of kind, always wins….A debonair Oxford P.P.E. man demurred, laughing incredulously: “But really, talk about philosophy with a woman!” A poetic Cambridge chap maintains categorically: “As soon as a woman starts talking about intellectual things, she loses her feminine charm for me.”
Plath countered that the American coeducational system made for a more equitable atmosphere, and she hoped that a Cambridge woman would be able, in the future, to “keep her female status while being accepted simultaneously as an intelligent human being.”51 Later she would tell an interviewer how at Cambridge she had been criticized for beginning a poem “just like John Donne, but not quite managing to finish like John Donne, and I first felt the full weight of English Literature on me.” Other women poets at Cambridge, she said, had approached her and asked her how she could bear to publish “because of the criticism, the terrible criticism.”52 Indeed, just showing up for an exam could be reason for criticism, as Jean Gooder remembered. “We girls streamed in, and the men who were the functionaries, who guarded the portals of the Divinity School, looked on us with such evident disapproval. It was a morning exam, and when we came back in the afternoon [for another exam], absolutely unrehearsed and undiscussed, we had all put on makeup.”53
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That October, 1955, Sylvia still imagined nothing would hold her back. She was excited to meet her academic supervisor, Miss Kathleen (Kay) Burton, and looked forward to attending her lectures and tutorials. She expected to feel “a bit strange and lonely,” as Mrs. Prouty had warned, and asked Aurelia to send her oatmeal cookies. “I shall probably sound quite homesick these first few weeks; I always enjoy giving love, and it is slightly painful to have it shut up in one until deep friendships develop…Do bear with me.”54 There was no party for her on her twenty-third birthday, though some Whitstead students left an earthen vase filled with yellow flowers in her room. She splurged on expensive art books thanks to her generous book allowance, and walked with a date, Ken Frater, to Grantchester, where they had tea by the fire at the Orchard.
Sylvia’s closest girlfriend that term was Jane Baltzell, an American Marshall scholar from Brown University who was also an English literature student and aspiring writer. The two got to know each other during walks across the back fields from Whitstead to Newnham’s dining hall each evening. Sylvia also became chummy with Evelyn Evans, who lived in a neighboring room in Whitstead. Both Jane and Evelyn remembered Sylvia “incessantly working,” pounding away at her typewriter at 6:30 a.m., more focused on her studies than “chit-chat in rooms over coffee.” Sylvia gave Evelyn the impression that her writing earnings helped keep her family afloat. Once, when Evelyn was nursing her during a bad cold, Sylvi
a told her she felt guilty about having a German father on account of the Holocaust. Evelyn found the conversation “morbid.” When she was well, though, Sylvia “had enough energy for umpteen people.” Evelyn often helped her choose her outfits for London jaunts as Sylvia posed in front of the full-length mirror in the corridor.55
But Sylvia spent more time with men. Soon she was receiving “surprise visits” from Americans, including Dick Wertz, Sassoon’s Yale roommate, who was studying theology at Cambridge; Myron Lotz, now studying medicine at Oxford; and a young man she had met at the Glascock Poetry Contest in Massachusetts. Dick took her punting along the Backs, which Sylvia described romantically for her mother: “swans and ducks bobbing for the apples fallen in the water from border gardens, innumerable crew shells and quaint low bridges, and weeping willows trailing over crenellated walls and the lacy spires of St. John’s College.”56 Myron’s visit was less enchanting: he bragged about his Yale summa degree and his new car, and Sylvia found herself “really disgusted by his american [sic] materialism which has degenerated into a disagreeable self-satisfaction and conceit.”57 She felt just the opposite—ignorant and unread compared to her sophisticated British peers.
Sylvia was eager to begin translating her experience onto the page, and wasted no time researching the English literary magazine market. Just five days after arriving in Cambridge she sent off her poems “Ice Age” and “Danse Macabre” to The London Magazine. She would soon publish in Chequer, one of the Cambridge literary magazines, though the quality of university poetry did not seem to her very high.
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