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The next two years were probably her happiest. She sent bulletins of social success ("Your daughter shook hands with Bulganin"; "We rode up in the elevator with Lionel and Diana Trilling"), and accounts of travel in France and Spain, which show a capacity for wonder and joy unreflected in her work. After marrying, she and Hughes came back to the U.S. to teach. Life was never easy. They lived in tiny apart ments and worked ceaselessly to clear a little time to write.
Restless, they moved back to Eng land where two children, Frieda and Nicholas, were born. Shortly afterward the marriage collapsed. Hughes' formidable powers to charm were turned on other women and Sylvia was consumed by jealousy. Sensing a return of the ear lier breakdown, Aurelia begged her daughter to come home. Though sick, broke, alone and in mental agony, she refused. "If I start running now," she predicted, "I will never stop, I shall hear of Ted all my life, his success, his genius." At times in the last months of her life she dreamed of "a salon in Lon don. I am a famous poetess here." But there was another reason for not seeking shelter. "I haven't the strength to see you for some time," she informed her mother. "I cannot face you again until I have a new life."
Household Despot. Sylvia never did face Aurelia. It was one more blow to someone who had never had much of a life. Aurelia's husband, a Boston University entomologist, was a house hold despot who died from complications of diabetes because he refused for years to consult a doctor (he considered his own diagnosis of lung cancer sufficient). At 34, Aurelia was a widow with two small children and a chronic ulcer.
Years later she was driven to the Smith commencement— where her daughter graduated summa cum laude — lying on a mattress in a friend's station wagon.
The time of Sylvia's death must have been hell. The posthumous publication of The Bell Jar can only have added to the pain.
Now 68, Mrs. Plath has retired and spent the past two years working on this essential volume. Her preface and connecting notes — plainspoken, styleless and intelligent — give the outlines of the bleaker, less event-ridden life that Sylvia's letters tried to fill. Though differ ent in temperament, mother and child recognized that they were very close. Be fore her first suicide attempt when she was 20, Sylvia had grasped Aurelia's hand and cried, "Oh Mother, the world is so rotten! I want to die! Let's die to gether!" It is now clear that the end came for Sylvia not only because she lost Hughes but because she could no longer grasp that hand.