On 25 March, Akutowicz replied, observing that he could hear Sylvia’s “gently malicious laughter” at his superficial impressions of her. He did not detect any “deeper tensions” in her. In fact, at first glance one might suppose she was “beautiful and dumb.” But she was hardly that, he added. In fact, he remembered not only conversations about poetry (Edmund Spenser in particular) but about probability, a subject that of course interested a mathematician. He remembered her hearty laugh and her unembarrassed description of crawling under the porch to take her own life. She was less neurotic than most young women he knew. What made her unusual, in his estimation, was her rather somber memories of her father, her intense dedication to poetry, and the way she “caught on to the idea of suicide as a reality.”

At the end of summer, Sylvia returned to her family home in Wellesley. Sylvia wrote relentlessly upbeat letters to Aurelia, who had taken the summer off to join her parents on Cape Cod and to recuperate from a recurrence of bleeding ulcers. To others, Sylvia made passing references to her “very attractive, but nervous mother, whom I see as little as possible.” Sylvia mentioned enjoyable weekends cooking for Gordon Lameyer. They had also seen Dr. Beuscher, on whom Sylvia still relied.

By the time Sylvia returned for her final year at Smith, she had decided to apply for a Fulbright scholarship to study at either Oxford or Cambridge. She was lining up her references: Elizabeth Drew, Mary Ellen Chase, and Newton Arvin, all distinguished Smith faculty, favorites of hers, and writers with national reputations. She thought a letter from Dr. Beuscher would be the best way to handle the story of her breakdown and institutionalization, which had resulted, in Sylvia’s view, in a complete cure. She was also applying to graduate school, with Harvard, Yale, and Columbia heading her list. She had reverted to her naturally brown hair to highlight a demure, studious look.

In the fall of 1954, Sylvia made friends at Smith with Elinor Klein, who was expecting to meet a “shy spectacled, unattractive kid in the corner clutching her Dostoevski for dear life.” But this was a willowy beauty with “great soft dark eyes,” a “wide laughing mouth,” and a “tumble of light hair.” Sylvia immediately dispelled any “worshipful attitudes” by showing Elinor her rejection slips, which Sylvia seemed proud of because they were proof of her hard work. They talked nonstop on the first of many glorious afternoons. Klein fondly remembered her friend’s humor, which bubbled up effortlessly, even during their “most serious conversations.”

Jody Simon, Smith ’55, knew Sylvia slightly. They shared a philosophy class, where Simon noticed that Plath’s comments were particularly insightful and interesting. “She always seemed to me to be trembling slightly” and fidgeting with her hair, Jody remembers. “I recall it as an inner intensity externalized.” Simon’s overall impression, though, was of a calm and confident person. “I appeared shy and reticent, described as ‘quiet’ in our ’55 yearbook, and I felt Sylvia extended herself toward me in a kind, interested and thoughtful way.” In a German course, Darryl Hafter watched a very quiet, unassuming Sylvia gradually master the language, in class presenting a Rilke poem in a powerful English translation of her own devising.

Sylvia attributed her good spirits that fall to her bohemian summer, suggesting to her mother that she had needed a break from her practical self—the one who stuck to a schedule, budgeted her time and money, and expressed her conventional, unoriginal, and puritanical side. Dr. Beuscher had evidently encouraged acting out, to rid Sylvia of the “good girl” mind-set that had made her resentful of her mother, the embodiment of prim and proper decorum. To Nancy Hunter, however, Sylvia had gone too far in the opposite direction, forsaking not merely the traditional behavior of a Smith undergraduate, but showing a disquieting lack of sense. Sylvia rationalized her “blazing jaunts” as learning the “hard way” to be independent.

Sylvia was aware of her penchant for mythologizing herself as she turned to Dostoevsky, preparing a senior thesis: a study of the double in his novels. In what is perhaps the study’s most revealing passage, Plath wonders whether Golyadkin, the protagonist of The Double, deals with a real alter ego or simply a projection of his imagination. She cites various critics who fault Dostoevsky for not clarifying his main character’s sense of reality. Plath concurs, but obviously the issue itself—what is real—exercised her deepest emotions. What she wrote about her childhood in essays like “Ocean 1212-W” and “America! America!” formed part of her essential myth. Was not the “Plath” of her journals and letters also her double and alter ego?

Marilyn Martin remembers a conversation with Sylvia about Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady “and how we become what we read sometimes. We move into that world. Sylvia and I talked about this. The difference in reading when you had to write about it rather than step outside and criticize. Identifying with the characters.” Like so many creative artists, Sylvia absorbed art into her bloodstream, and it took considerable effort for her to function outside of that assimilated sensibility and write as a literary critic. In fact, on her first English assignment at Smith, she had been dismayed to receive a B–. It is often said that her worries about doing well at Smith were a product of perfectionism, but such an analysis ignores how strenuous it was for a sensibility like hers to conform to the academic model of learning. Her thesis on Dostoevsky proves that she could learn to write a scholarly paper perfectly well, but her letters also show that doing so put a strain on her. Her switch from Joyce to Dostoevsky also suggests that she found a theme in the Russian author that resonated more deeply in her than anything Joyce wrote.

That Sylvia Plath perceived her mythologizing tendencies did not mean, of course, that she could control them, or that she would not make mistakes, misconstruing the dream for the reality, as Golyadkin does. Going to England on a Fulbright scholarship (if she was fortunate to be offered one) would be another test, she wrote her mother on 13 October. Taking up her scholarship would mean relinquishing the security of her native land, finding new friends, and attempting to succeed in a formidable, intellectually unfamiliar world. As she worked on the first draft of her senior thesis, she worried about having something new to say about an old topic. Isn’t this also what England represented: daring to do well in a culture far older than her own and daunting to an upstart American? She did not consider, however, that England, too, would become a Sylvia Plath project, seen through her own special lenses, which could distort as well as discover reality.

The literary world became more palpable for Sylvia Plath when she encountered Alfred Kazin, author of On Native Grounds and a prominent American literary critic, teaching a course at Smith. Her description of a curt and aloof figure is apposite. In New York Jew, Kazin recalls that she looked like any other Smith student. When she showed him her work, he became suspicious, because it was so polished and professional. Suggesting that she was presenting him with plagiarism, Kazin named the magazines such work appeared in. “I know,” Plath replied. “They’ve already taken them.”

He warmed up when he realized that Plath was a published author and deadly serious about writing. He liked that she had worked her way through college. He had been disappointed with his apathetic students and at first assumed she was simply another “pampered Smith baby,” Sylvia wrote her mother on 25 October. He invited her to audit his class, which she did, vowing to learn as much as she could from “such a man,” who told her the class needed her contribution. She did not elaborate, but what Kazin offered her was another version of independence. He took the money and the tributes from the academic world in stride, but unlike her other professors, he was not really part of it. The point was to write; there were no excuses for not doing so. “You don’t write to support yourself; you work to support your writing,” was his message to Plath, one she quoted to her mother. She soon became a Kazin favorite. Constance Blackwell can still hear him calling her: “Syl-via, Syl-via.” In the letter he wrote in support of her application to graduate school, Kazin noted he was not in the habit of writing on behalf of students—and certainly not with the superlatives he used to describe Plath. “She is someone to be watched, to be encouraged—and to be remembered,” he concluded.