When we see a female character reading The Bell Jar in a movie, we know she will make trouble. As the critic Maggie Nelson reminds us, “to be called the Sylvia Plath of anything is a bad thing.” Nelson reminds us, too, that a woman who explores depression in her art isn’t perceived as “a shamanistic voyager to the dark side, but a ‘madwoman in the attic,’ an abject spectacle.”

She pioneered the poetry of motherhood and challenged the male Romantic notion that the moorland outside her door was more sublime than her baby’s nursery. She is one of the first poets in English to write about miscarriage, abortion, and postpartum anxiety.

Like her mother, Sylvia, as wife to a “genius” husband, masked what was smoldering inside with perfect deportment. She would embrace the role of housewife to her friends and correspondents, and then seethe in her journal about the injustices of that role.

She was “so dead” by eight p.m. that she went straight to sleep. “So I sit here exhausted, seeing no way out, seeing only slavery from six in the morning till eight at night,” she wrote her mother after just one week with the Mayos. “I feel that I’m cut off from all humankind.” These letters provide, perhaps, a clue to the riddle of her suicide twelve years later, when she was a single mother in a foreign country with little help, company, or money, caring for two sick toddlers in a cold flat with intermittent electricity and hot water.

In her journal Plath acknowledged that many of her insecurities about her own future “come again to the fact that it is a man’s world.” She wondered why women should “be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of soul, body and pride of man? Being born a woman is my awful tragedy.” She longed to “mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars….I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.”

Hughes’s Cambridge degree could have led to a professional career in education, publishing, or journalism. Instead, he worked at a steel factory as a night security guard and washed dishes at the London Zoo. He fantasized about working on a North Sea trawler but knew his family expected more. “I shall have to get a proper respectable job, because if I don’t Ma will just worry herself away,” he wrote to Gerald in 1954. During the summer of 1955, he traveled to Paris and dabbled in the Left Bank life, writing poetry in cafés and subsisting cheaply on wine, baguettes, and cheese. Like Plath, he dreamed of traveling and writing his way through Europe, though applying for grants and fellowships would not have occurred to him.

Back at Cambridge, she paid for her leisurely weekend by staying up all night on Monday to finish her Plato paper for Dr. Krook. As the birds began their morning song, she felt “tense, tired—electric wires trilling in blood—green milky dawn.”

Hughes later wrote a poem about this quarrel called “Moonwalk.” In an early, more personal draft that differs considerably from the final poem, he wrote that Plath had run outside in a “dumb rage,” and he had followed, bewildered. “I came after you to catch you, maybe / As you walked into the sea / Or off the edge of a cliff.” They walked along on a “moonlit hill with its contorted olives” overlooking the harbor. In the poem, he tries to calm her. “ ‘Look,’ I said, ‘the lamps of the sardine fleet.’ ” He felt as though they were floating in space. “Your mask was bleak as cut iron,” he wrote. I had no idea what was going on behind it. I still hardly knew you. No idea What might come flapping out of your cupped hands. I watched. Doctor of all difficulties, I humored. Your attempt to kill yourself long since Was meaningless to me as my own death. I tended the life of the survivor which had nothing to do with the dead one’s.

Her confidence in their future was astounding, and prescient. “Darling, be scrupulous and date your letters. When we are old and spent, they will come asking for our letters; and we will have them dove-tailable.” She told Hughes, “someday, I will be a rather damn good woman writer.” Plath criticized Hughes’s poems insightfully and confidently. “How about another word for ‘hideous’? I’d like better something that showed the eyes hideous, as in the fine ‘Snake’s twisted eye.’ ” At times she sounded professorial. “I don’t think ‘horrible void’ is the best you can do; I’m eternally suspicious of editorializing with horribles, terribles, awfuls and hideouses; make the void horrible; let your reader have the sweet joy of exclaiming” ‘ah! Horrible!’ ”

“Virginia Woolf helps,” she wrote in her journal. “Her novels make mine possible.” Woolf’s writing inspired her to believe in her own vocation and even to “go better than she.” She promised herself: “No children until I have done it….My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time.”

“I have been, and am, battling depression,” she wrote plainly on June 20, and made an astute self-diagnosis: "It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative—which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it. I am now flooded with despair, almost hysteria, as if I were smothering. As if a great muscular owl were sitting on my chest, its talons clenching & constricting my heart."

Lowell was one of the few poets Plath did not regard with contempt or jealousy.

Though Sylvia would later complain that Yaddo was too monastic—a “nunnery”—this was the first time in her life she was completely free of both academic and domestic obligations. Even during her previous stretches of uninterrupted writing time in Benidorm, Boston, and Cape Cod, she had been responsible for the cooking, shopping, cleaning, dishes, laundry, ironing, mending, typing, bookkeeping, and the myriad other tasks that fell to women in the 1950s. At Yaddo, she was able to separate from Hughes, literally and figuratively. Her new pregnancy, her freedom from domestic chores, and her private studio helped her inhabit a less circumscribed psychological space that enabled her to make daring creative leaps.

Alvarez came round to Chalcot Square not long after Frieda’s birth to interview Hughes, who immediately reminded him of Heathcliff: “He was a man who seemed to carry his own climate with him, to create his own atmosphere, and in those days that atmosphere was dark and dangerous.” Yet Hughes also seemed to Alvarez “quiet-spoken, shrewd and modest. He was not a man to give himself airs and never came on as a poet. It was not a line of work that would have cut much ice with his neighbours in Yorkshire or Devon and he had no taste for the literary world. But he was utterly sure of his talent.”

...most of her poems rest secure in a mass of experience that is never quite brought out into daylight….It is this sense of threat, as though she were continually menaced by something she could see only out of the corner of her eye, that gives her work its distinction.

Hughes would always believe that Plath had access to his unconscious. He later suggested it was no coincidence that they had written about similar themes in The Bell Jar and the Bardo Thodol while they were both working in Bill Merwin’s study during the spring of 1961: “for about three months we were both every day soaking our heads in the same death and expiation and rebirth myth, in the same cubic yard of space, she in the mornings, me in the afternoons.”

Sylvia answered the phone and was allegedly surprised to hear an Irishwoman’s voice. When Hughes returned, according to him, “1/4 hour late” from his lunch with Doolan, he found Plath furious. In 1974, Hughes told Frances McCullough, who edited Plath’s abridged journals, that Plath “had torn up all his writing into strips, his writing and his notes.” He said this was one of the times when he had seen Sylvia’s “rages,” her “demonic side, destructive, like ‘black electricity.’ ” Immediately after he told the story, he admitted, as McCullough recorded in her notes, that “he used to try slapping her out of her rages, but it was no good. And once she turned into his slap and got a black eye, and went to the doctor and told him Ted beat her regularly. But then as it began to heal, she decided it looked dramatic, and began to mascara the other eye to match.”

Her passing, almost blasé reference to this incident in her letter to Dr. Beuscher suggests that she probably did not think of herself as a victim at a time when slapping a “hysterical” woman was culturally sanctioned, even glamorized in Hollywood films.

Ruth’s first impression of Sylvia was “of a burningly ambitious and intelligent young woman trying to look like a conventional, devoted wife but not quite succeeding. There was something almost excessive about that disguise.”

At least he had finally revealed the identity of the “femme fatale”: Assia Wevill, whom Sylvia dubbed “Weavy Asshole” to Dr. Beuscher. She had known it was Assia, of course, but to hear Ted confirm her suspicions at last was freeing.