That thickening thickening glass window between me and that real self of mine which was trapped in the unmanageable experience of what had happened with her and me. And so—because I could never break up the log-jam…never open the giant plate glass door of it, that real self of mine could never get on with its life, could never join me and help me get on with my life.
Publishing the poems helped him, he wrote, experience “a freedom of imagination I’ve not felt since 1962.”43 Many critics remonstrated with Hughes for eliding his own role in Plath’s suicide. Yet the book was wildly successful, and became one of the best-selling poetry collections of all time. “God knows what sort of book it is,” Hughes wrote Sagar, “but at least none of it is faked.”44
* * *
IN HER FIRST DRAFT of “Edge,” Plath wrote, “Now nothing can happen / We stiffen in the air like beacons / At the road’s end.”45 These lines suggest the end of an exhausting, anticlimactic quest. On the day she wrote them Plath may have felt that she had come to “the road’s end” in her life and in her work. Yet the surreal grandeur of “Edge”—indeed all of Ariel and the 1963 poems—opened up new aesthetic possibilities that would change the direction of modern poetry. Plath’s posthumously published Collected Poems, gathered and edited by Hughes, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982.
With each passing decade, Sylvia Plath’s work seems more astonishing, and its achievements harder earned. As Hughes wrote, “every word is Baraka: the flame and the rose folded together. Poets have often spoken about this ideal possibility, but where else, outside these poems, has it actually occurred?”46 The old comparisons to Medea and Electra no longer hold. If she must be a myth, let her be Ariadne, laying down the threads, leading us out from the center of the labyrinth. Let us not desert her.
Otto Plath as a young man
Otto Plath upon his graduation from Northwestern College, Wisconsin, 1910
Otto Plath, 1924
Otto Plath in the 1930s
Aurelia Plath with her daughter, Sylvia, April 1933
Sylvia Plath, 1935. In the margin of this photo, Aurelia Plath wrote, “Sylvia is always merry!”
Aurelia, Otto, and Sylvia Plath at the Arnold Arboretum, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, July 1933
Sylvia Plath, posed with a book, 1934
Sylvia Plath, Winthrop, Massachusetts, c. July 1936
Aurelia Plath (left) with her sister, Dorothy Schober, and Sylvia Plath, Point Shirley, Winthrop, Massachusetts, c. 1936
Aurelia and Sylvia Plath, August 1937
A page from Sylvia Plath’s scrapbook with photos from her childhood in Winthrop, Massachusetts
Sylvia Plath doing tricks on her bicycle, c. 1942–43. Sylvia pasted this photo in her scrapbook with the caption “The acrobat on her new bike!”
Sylvia Plath in her Girl Scout uniform, August 1946
Sylvia Plath in her yard, Wellesley, Massachusetts, May 1947
26 Elmwood Road, Wellesley, Massachusetts, 1948
Sylvia Plath’s drawing of her mother, August 1948
Sylvia, Warren, and Aurelia Plath, September 1949
Sylvia Plath, dressed up for a dance, 1949
The Norton boys. From left, Perry, David, and Dick. Sylvia pasted this photo in her scrapbook.
Sylvia Plath and friends at the King Philip dance club, Wrentham, Massachusetts, summer 1949. Her date is second from left.
Sylvia Plath’s high school graduation portrait, 1950
Sylvia Plath, marked by her mother with a star above her head, at the Star Island Unitarian retreat, New Hampshire, June 1949
Sylvia Plath, the day of her high school graduation, June 1950. Above this photo she wrote in her scrapbook, “You knew that if you just let time go by, you would very soon be old.”
Paradise Pond, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts
Olive Higgins Prouty at her sixtieth Smith College reunion, 1964
Sylvia Plath and Marcia Brown, Francestown, New Hampshire, February 1951
Sylvia Plath (bottom row, third from left) at a party for first-year students, Haven House, Smith College, May 1951
Sylvia Plath and Dick Norton at the Yale Junior Prom, March 9, 1951. Above this photo in her scrapbook, Plath wrote, “A photo of the very young, very gay collegiates after a rather exhilarating evening.”
Sylvia Plath with the Mayo children, Joanne, Freddie, and Pinny, on the North Shore of Massachusetts, summer 1951
Sylvia Plath sunbathing on the North Shore of Massachusetts, summer 1951
The Mayo mansion, Swampscott, Massachusetts. Plath took this photo and pasted it in her scrapbook. She lived on the top floor, with her own balcony, during the summer of 1951.
Sylvia Plath, Marblehead, Massachusetts, July 1951
Sylvia Plath and her “psychic brother,” Perry Norton, at Yale, spring 1953
Sylvia Plath and Myron Lotz, spring 1953
Sylvia Plath interviewing Elizabeth Bowen, May 1953
Sylvia Plath at a Mademoiselle dance at the St. Regis Hotel, New York City, June 1953. Plath later mocked this photo, which appeared in the August edition of Mademoiselle, in The Bell Jar.
McLean Hospital, Belmont, Massachusetts
Dr. Ruth Beuscher, late 1950s
Sylvia Plath, Northampton, Massachusetts, 1954
Sylvia Plath with her mother and brother, Christmas, 1953. Plath was still a patient at McLean Hospital when this photograph was taken. She pasted it in her scrapbook, along with a Christmas card from McLean, and provided a caption: “1953—fall—a time of darkness, despair, disillusion as black only as the human mind can be—symbolic death, and numb shock—psychic regeneration—McLean Christmas and memory of mental alma mater from which, at last, I graduated ‘summa.’ ”
Sylvia Plath at Chatham, Cape Cod, July 1954
Sylvia Plath and Gordon Lameyer, Chatham, Cape Cod, July 1954
Sylvia Plath in her Wellesley backyard, c. 1954–55
Sylvia Plath’s room at Lawrence House, Smith College, April 1955, where she typed more than fifty poems for her poetry tutorial with Alfred Fisher
Sylvia Plath interviewing Marianne Moore, April 15, 1955, at the Glascock Poetry Contest, Mount Holyoke College
Warren and Sylvia Plath, Wellesley, Massachusetts, 1955
Newnham College, Cambridge
Whitstead, where Plath lived at Cambridge. Ted Hughes and Luke Myers threw stones at her top-floor, four-paneled window to get her attention.
Sylvia Plath posing in the Cambridge University paper, Varsity, in May 1956. “She made her impact,” Daniel Huws said of this spread.
Sylvia Plath in Venice, spring 1956
Sylvia Plath in Paris, spring 1956
Ted Hughes, 1960
Eighteen Rugby Street, Bloomsbury, London, where Plath and Hughes spent their wedding night
St. George the Martyr, the Bloomsbury church where Plath and Hughes married in secret on June 16, 1956
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath on their honeymoon in Paris, August 1956
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in Yorkshire, England, 1956
Moorland around Haworth, home of the Brontë sisters and the setting of Wuthering Heights. Plath liked to compare herself and Hughes to Cathy and Heathcliff, and the couple often walked these moors when they visited Yorkshire. Plath told her mother it was the only place she did not miss the ocean.
The Beacon, Ted Hughes’s family home, sitting high atop the Calder Valley in Heptonstall, West Yor
kshire
Sylvia Plath writing on a stone wall near the Beacon, Heptonstall, September 1956
Heptonstall village center. One long-time resident remembered that when strangers walked through town, “the curtains would twitch open.”
Top Withens, the reputed model for Wuthering Heights. Plath and Hughes often walked here, and Plath set several poems in the area.
The commanding hilltop village of Heptonstall, which Hughes later characterized as the center of the Celtic kingdom of Elmet
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Cambridge, England, 1957
Ted Hughes, Wellesley, c. 1957
Sylvia Plath sailing into New York Harbor on the Queen Elizabeth II, June 1957
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, New York City, June 1959
Sylvia Plath reading her poems in The New Yorker, August 1958
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath inside their apartment at 9 Willow Street, Boston, 1958
Sylvia Plath at Jackson Lake, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, July 1959
Ted Hughes on the North Dakota prairie, July 1959
Ted Hughes in Wisconsin, July 1959
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes stopping for a break during their drive across America, summer 1959
Sylvia Plath, Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada, July 1959
Sylvia Plath rowing at Yellowstone, summer 1959
Plath’s study on the top floor of West House, Yaddo. Here she learned to be true to her own “weirdnesses.”
Hughes’s study, “Outlook,” at Yaddo, a five-minute walk from West House
The rose garden at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York, which may have served as a model for the garden of “Edge”
West House, Yaddo, where Plath and Hughes spent the fall of 1959
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath at Marcia Brown Plumer’s home in Concord, Massachusetts, December 1959, shortly before their departure for England
3 Chalcot Square, with its blue plaque commemorating Sylvia Plath. Plath and Hughes lived on the top floor.
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes with baby Frieda, Hampton Court Palace, London, May 1960
Sylvia Plath with Frieda, nine months, January 1961
“A Pride of Poets.” From left: Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, T. S. Eliot, and Louis MacNeice, at a Faber and Faber party, London, June 1960
Plath’s photos of Hughes with Valerie and T. S. Eliot, London, c. 1960-61
Court Green, North Tawton, Devon, as it appears today. Plath’s study looked across the old graveyard.
North Tawton village center
The Devon countryside where Plath went riding on Ariel, 1962
Sylvia Plath and Frieda at Court Green, fall 1962
Sylvia Plath and her children, Frieda and Nicholas, among the daffodils at Court Green, April 1962
Yeats’s House, 23 Fitzroy Road, London. This was Plath’s last residence. The second-floor windows looked out from her living room; the top two windows belonged to the children’s room (right) and the au pair room (left). Plath’s bedroom study faced the back garden.
The view from Sylvia Plath’s bedroom study at 23 Fitzroy Road
Sylvia Plath’s grave in Heptonstall, England
Assia Wevill, Great Hormead, England, May 1959
Ted Hughes, Assia Wevill, and Shura Hughes, mid-1960s
Assia Wevill and baby Shura, Court Green, Devon, c. 1965–1966.
Assia Wevill with Frieda, Nicholas, and Shura Hughes, December 1966
Sylvia Plath, “Woman with Halo,” c. 1950 –51
Sylvia Plath’s 1960 collage of the Eisenhower era
Sylvia Plath, “Triple-face Portrait,” c. 1950 –51
Sylvia Plath, “Two Women Reading,” c. 1950 –51
Sylvia Plath, “Self-portrait,” 1951
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the following people for sharing their memories of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Aurelia Plath, Olwyn Hughes, Dr. Ruth Beuscher, and others: Peter Aldrich, Paul Alexander, the late Al Alvarez, Anne Alvarez, Robert Bagg, Jonathan Bate, Jillian Becker, Terry Bragg, Stuart Burne, Janet Burroway, Margaret Affleck Clark, Don Colburn, David Compton, Ruth Crossley, Dr. Francis de Marneffe, Harriett Destler, Ruth Fainlight, Michael Frayn, Linda Gates, Ruth Freeman Geissler, Vivette and Jon Glover, Jean Gooder, Isabel Murray Henderson, Elizabeth Hinchcliffe, the late Philip Hobsbaum, Daniel Huws, Frank Irish, Robert Jocelyn, Elinor Friedman Klein, Karen Kukil, Richard Larschan, Lynne Lawner, Christopher Levenson, Suzette and Helder Macedo, Carol LeVarn McCabe, Phil McCurdy, Marcia Momtchiloff, Richard Murphy, Kenneth Neville-Davies, Dr. Perry Norton, Judith Raymo, the late Wilfrid Riley, Howard Rogovin, Janet Salter Rosenberg, Jon Rosenthal, Neva Nelson, Grace Schulman, Dr. Lorna Secker-Walker, Norman Shapiro, the late Elizabeth Compton Sigmund, May Collacott Targett, Claire Tomalin, Betsy Powley Wallingford, David Wevill, Louise Giesey White, Guy Wilbor, Nick Wilding, Mel Woody, and Laurie Totten Woolschlager. Linda Johnson kindly showed me around Sylvia Plath’s former home at 23 Fitzroy Road, London, and let me photograph the view from Plath’s bedroom study window.
Thank you to those who provided literary support, advice, and camaraderie along the way: Kai Bird, Adam Plunkett, Aidan Levy, Cynthia Carr, Lindsey Whalen, Abigail Santamaria, Ruth Franklin, David Nasaw, Gary Giddins, and Thad Ziolkowski at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, Graduate Center, City University of New York; Hermione Lee and Kate Kennedy at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, Wolfson College, Oxford; Anne Thomson at Newnham College, Cambridge; Louisa Carroll at University College Dublin; Ann Bolotin at the Lilly Library, Indiana University; Carrie Hintz, Kathy Shoemaker, and Emily Banks at the Rose Library, Emory University; Fran Baker at the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester; Helen Melody—who really went above and beyond—at the British Library; Mark Wormald, Terry Gifford, Neil Roberts, and Carrie Smith at the Ted Hughes Society; Lesley Johnson, Nick Wilding, the late Mark Hinchcliffe, Julia Hinchcliffe, Jeni Wetton, and Charlotte Wetton at the Elmet Trust; Gloria Biamonte, Laura D’Angelo, Travis Norsen, and Catherine O’Callaghan at Marlboro College; Jonathan Santlofer at Yaddo; Eli Trautwein, Sandeep Shuvakimur, and Keri Walsh in Chappaqua/Mount Kisco. Thank you to others who have shared my love of Plath’s work and provided support in both formal and informal ways over the years: Janet Badia, Tracy Brain, Sarah Corbett, Gail Crowther, Mary Dearborn, Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, Julie Irigaray, Tim Kendall, Amanda Golden, Teresa Griffiths, Langdon Hammer, Eric Laursen, Elizabeth Lowry, Kathleen Ossip, and Michael Parker. Isobel Hurst put me up in London many times, and joined me on my Plath-related travels in the UK. Special thanks are due to the members of the English and Creative Writing Department at the University of Huddersfield—especially Steve Ely, James Underwood, and Jessica Malay. I feel very lucky to work with such talented, passionate, and good-humored colleagues. For many years of encouragement and support: Grainne Coen, Bridget Steinkrauss, Krista Kubick, Amy Schneider, Lauren Ouziel, Daria Zawadzki, Alexa Carver, Joanna D’Afflitti, Cary Donaldson, Roslyn Clarke, Zahr Said, Tina Benipayo, Christian Kirschke, Leah Clark, Mark Clark, and the rest of the Clark and Valentino clans.
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