Eddie Cohen seems to have been the only one of Sylvia’s correspondents who did not take her recovery at face value. On 28 April, he wrote a detailed response to two of her letters describing her breakdown. Something was missing for him. Why did she descend into such a deep depression at the very moment when “life should have been at a peak”? He realized that he was probing experiences that were still raw, but he seriously doubted that Sylvia could go on for long without understanding why she had chosen that manner of suicide and why her initial therapy had been so ineffective. He was asking her, in short, to examine her reactions: “Attempting to cherish that old life when things were so relatively uncomplicated will do you little good, and when reality intrudes, as it eventually must, you will merely bounce back to where you so recently returned hence.”

Back at it on 6 May, Eddie would not let go—this time pointing out how Sylvia tried to incorporate her male suitors into stories of her own making. Eddie proved to be intractable material when he showed up unannounced. Since Sylvia had not scripted the occasion, what “could have been an exhilarating experience turned into a stiff debacle,” Eddie complained. The super-organized Sylvia had been overwhelmed by her experience at Mademoiselle, Eddie pointed out, because so much of her routine mandated that she respond to the demands of others: “You like to plot all the possibilities in your future as if it were a short story. When I first heard of your problems last summer, I could not but wonder what went wrong that you had not counted on.”

Two days earlier, Sylvia wrote her mother, “Just a note in the midst of a rigorously planned schedule…” She seemed to revel in a ten-hours-per-day reading project that would take her through the end of May, writing Phil on 13 May after a “full day of rigid discipline” finishing War and Peace and Anna Karenina. She was looking forward to the summer—a little too exuberantly, as it turned out. Pace Eddie.

Sylvia went home with bleached blonde hair. A shocked Aurelia adjusted, admitting in Letters Home that the change was flattering. Sylvia told Gordon Lameyer that she thought her new hair color drew attention away from her facial scar. After a round of visits to New York and a short stay in Wellesley, Plath joined Nancy Hunter for a summer in Cambridge, studying German at Harvard summer school and attending many cultural events. They visited Olive Higgins Prouty on the way. The giddy and irrepressible girls ate two helpings of cucumber sandwiches in a most “unladylike display of gluttony,” Hunter wrote.

Hunter has provided a striking portrayal of Sylvia’s summer in a memoir that was first written in the 1970s to correct certain misapprehensions about Plath. For all her high-powered ambitions and her literary interests, Sylvia was in many ways a conventional Smith girl. She was no rebel and indeed disapproved of a Lawrence House contingent of nonconformists who spurned Smith proprieties. She took her world as it was, Hunter notes, not imagining that it would change much—or that she had any obligation to challenge its conventions. One of Sylvia’s projects that summer, in fact, was to work on her cooking, an undertaking that impressed Nancy. Sylvia’s tastes were sophisticated, and though they had a food budget, she tended to ignore the staples, expecting Hunter to take care of those, while Plath worked on her creations. Although Hunter complained that her roommate’s penchant for specialty items was putting a strain on their limited resources, Sylvia brushed off this concern as Nancy’s problem.

Plath did not seem at all sensitive about discussing her previous summer’s breakdown. Indeed, she provided Nancy with a startling comment on Otto Plath (not surprising to readers of “Daddy”), calling him an “autocrat” and saying, “I adored and despised him, and I probably wished many times that he were dead. When he obliged me and died, I imagined that I had killed him.”

The roommates agreed to accept all dates that included dinner, although a wary Nancy had second thoughts about a professor, identified as “Irwin,” they met outside Widener Library, where Esther Greenwood meets her Irwin in The Bell Jar. According to Steiner, Irwin later called and asked Nancy for a date. She was surprised to learn on the way to dinner that he would be preparing it. She had not been alone with a man in such circumstances and only agreed to accompany him when he told her he would keep the door open and that his landlady was nearby. In the course of the evening, though, he made a pass and ended up chasing Nancy around his apartment. She escaped and told an intrigued Sylvia about her misadventure. When Irwin phoned, Sylvia took his calls and eventually agreed, to Nancy’s amazement, to date him. The message was clear: Plath felt she could handle such a man, a “wolf” in the parlance of the 1950s. Indeed, she wrote to Gordon Lameyer about Nancy’s tendency to overreact. Nancy was like “sun-silver on a dark, moody lake, and her calm is a result of tensions which break open at home in shrill, neurotic screaming.” Learning to deal with Nancy had been good for Sylvia, she told Gordon, since she had been able to work on her own equanimity to compensate for Nancy’s “eternal crises.”

But Sylvia returned from her date in distress, bleeding copiously. She admitted Irwin had raped her. A terrified Sylvia—in morbid fear of hospitals and of the kind of attention she had received after her suicide attempt—made Nancy call a doctor Irwin had previously summoned to treat Sylvia, and on the phone Nancy took his instructions as to how to treat the hemorrhage. When the bleeding proved intractable, Nancy finally persuaded Sylvia they had to go to the hospital. Nancy then called Irwin, insisting that he drive them to the hospital to meet the doctor there and pay for Sylvia’s treatment. While there, Nancy heard the doctor say that Sylvia would have no more trouble. And then he added that what she had experienced was not surprising. He had treated other girls in the same situation. To Nancy’s astonishment, Sylvia continued to see Irwin.

How to account for this seeming masochism? As the doctor’s parting comment suggests, the conception of sexual abuse in the 1950s was quite different from contemporary attitudes toward such behavior. To the Irwins of Sylvia’s day, women were fair game, and the women themselves were blameworthy. How Sylvia saw her culpability is not clear, especially since Hunter apparently was not privy to her roommate’s motivations.

Sylvia may not have been able to explain her behavior to herself. She seemed to be undergoing a transformation that had gone underground, so to speak, provoking an irritated Eddie to complain on 10 August that her letters were “too sparing.” She was dodging him, teasing and tantalizing, Eddie concluded. Nancy noted, “Sylvia seemed to regard man as an object that could be manipulated at will.” Nancy and Sylvia remained friends but were never again so close. Nancy believed that Sylvia “absorbed the essence of people like doses of a unique psychedelic drug designed to expand her consciousness. Sometimes she seemed to forget that they had emotions and wills of their own.”

Kay Quinn, one of the Smith girls who had shared the Cambridge apartment with Sylvia and Nancy, later told Helen Lane that Sylvia sometimes acted “strange,” prompting Kay to suspect that she had not overcome the behavior that resulted in her suicide attempt. Kay also mentioned an incident in which Sylvia, bleeding heavily from her vagina, asked Kay to hold her. Whether this incident is related to Irwin’s rape is not clear. But Plath’s reckless involvement with Irwin—even after she had been warned by Nancy—seems a precursor of her later desire to take on the daunting Ted Hughes.

The accounts of Irwin in Nancy Hunter Steiner’s memoir and in The Bell Jar are so similar that Plath scholar Peter K. Steinberg—after noting that Irwin is referred to as Edwin in Paul Alexander’s biography—decided to track down the real man. In the Frances McCullough Papers at the University of Maryland, Steinberg discovered a letter, dated 11 January 1975, from the poet Donald Hall speculating that his friend, Edwin Akutowicz, was Irwin. Akutowicz had just written Hall a letter expressing surprise that the Sylvia Plath he had dated had become famous. Hall called Edwin “totally unworldly. He went around making love with women, at an extraordinary rate, without any affect at all, as far as anybody could tell.” This description certainly fits the oblivious Irwin in the novel and the memoir, as does the fact that, like Irwin, Edwin (with a 1948 Harvard PhD) was a mathematics professor. On 10 March 1975, McCullough wrote to Akutowicz, explaining she had edited Plath’s letters and was curious to learn his impression of Sylvia, who when he knew her was just beginning to reengage with the world after her suicide attempt.