Sylvia enjoyed Paris and Nice, writing detailed letters to Mallory Wober about her travels—although she did not mention spending much of her time in the company of Richard Sassoon. In her journal, she described traveling together with him in a train compartment, with the “good weight of Sassoon, sleeping fitfully, on my breast.” Her mention of the train rocking on the rails intensifies the maternal image. This moment seems a reprieve from the striving, frantic nature of her ambition, which manifested as early as the sixth grade, when she mapped her imagination with an image of Marseille—now visible from her train window—set against the moon shining on the Mediterranean. Her journal explodes with colors—red for the earth, orange for the villas roofs, yellow and peach and aqua for the walls, and green palms juxtaposed with a “screaming blue sea.” She had returned to childhood, to her sea-girl reveries.

At the end of this seemingly idyllic holiday, Richard confessed that he had been seeing someone else, a Swiss girl who wanted to marry him. He wanted to be free to continue seeing her and perhaps others. His abrupt announcement struck hard at Plath’s amour propre. She wrote a twenty-five-page story about her French sojourn, which The New Yorker rejected in late February, and which Sylvia herself came to regard as “absurd and sentimental.” But she did not quite give up on Sassoon, confessing to Aurelia that he was the only man she had ever “really loved.” She often dressed in black now, she noted in her journal, which contained passages addressing her lost love as though he were dead. Richard had brought out “the highest” in her, she confessed to John, one of her Cambridge pursuers. Plenty of “nice boys” had wanted to marry her, but she was holding out for a man equal to all of her. Sassoon had come closest to her ideal, and yet she worried about his health and his depressive nature. He did not look like the kind of man that should attract her, but he did anyway, she admitted to her mother. In another mood, she supposed that she loved Richard for what she wanted to make of him, and not for himself. Richard’s desertion led to a culminating wail in her journal: She wanted a husband, lover, father, and son “all at once.” She hoped that Richard would again have need of her. She sent a note to Mallory Wober on 8 February begging off a date because she was in a ferocious mood and, like Garbo, wanted to be left alone.

Marriage seemed to preoccupy Plath’s thoughts, and she kept writing to her mother that she was not a “career girl.” She missed the depth of connection that family life fostered. Apparently still thinking of Sassoon, in her journal she wrote about her desire to fight for the man she wanted. She envisioned a life abroad on the Continent, near the “moving currents of people.” Not even her grandmother’s terminal cancer could draw Sylvia back to America, which she now regarded as a dead end. She was hoping for a renewal of her Fulbright, so that she would not have to sell matches in Moscow or make a fast buck on the Place Pigalle.

Expectations about the future and a summer on the Continent were just enough to keep Sylvia going during an otherwise dreary period in her social and creative life. She had sold a superficial piece about Cambridge to The Christian Science Monitor and continued sending her work to The New Yorker, but her poetry struck her as “glib.” She admitted to her mother on 25 February that she had seen a psychiatrist, whose welcoming manner made it comfortable for her to discuss her past and feel some continuity with the stateside life she had left behind. She realized that in Newnham, her home college, she had no equivalent of the older women who had guided her at Smith. She called the female dons “bluestocking grotesques.” Even worse, each college within Cambridge was a closed society, making it virtually impossible for Sylvia to find a mature mentor outside of Newnham, where women professors knew only a “second-hand” sort of life.

Aching for a way to break out of her midwinter slump, Sylvia wrote her mother on 25 February that she was about to attend a party to celebrate a new literary review representing a departure from the staid college publications, which seemed amateurish to her. The new journal, put together by a group of American and British students, had a bracing, astringent, and “taut” style that she admired. At the end of her 3 March letter, Sylvia mentioned meeting an ex-Cambridge poet at a wild party sponsored by St. Botolph’s Review. She had written a poem about him and noted he was the first British man she could be “strong enough to be equal with.” She doubted she would ever see him again. “Such is life,” she concluded, as though believing this time she would not be able to make her imagination and reality coincide.

Sylvia arrived at the party already drunk but in good enough shape to remember and recite the work of Ted Hughes, the St. Botolph’s poet she most admired. According to her journal, she entered the room with “brave ease.” Jane Baltzell Kopp, Sylvia’s doppelgänger, watched Sylvia arrive and thought she looked “young and uncertain, which was not characteristic.” Jane was at the party because she had read Hughes’s “savage poems, powerful and contemporary in content,” so different from the “mannered, bloodless, facile style of the other undergraduates.” As Hughes himself wrote to his sister, Olwyn, he rejected the “meanness and deadness of almost all modern English verse.” Jane wanted to get a good look at Ted Hughes but decided not to accost the brooding, apparently misanthropic man leaning against a wall. “He was large and alarmingly powerful, both physically and in psychological presence.” His dark expression had a malign impact on the party, Kopp suggests. Writing to a friend, Hughes showed no sign of having been unhappy. He had a hand in organizing the party at the Women’s Union, picking a well-appointed room with church-like stained windows, some of which had been smashed in the revelry.

Kopp adds a detail that helps explain why Plath focused on Hughes. His work, Kopp reckons, “came very near to carrying off the audacity of the almost-Renaissance rhetoric in which they were written.” When Plath arrived at Cambridge, she almost immediately realized that although Smith had prepared her well in Chaucer and Shakespeare, she did not have a good grasp of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature she was now expected to master. And here was Hughes, so young and yet, in certain important respects, already an adept.

Plath’s mood is best gauged by analyzing her journal references to the “satanic Luke”: Lucas Myers, nearly as tall as Ted and, to Sylvia, the only one at the party who rivaled Hughes as a writer. She danced first with Myers, who later remembered her red shoes and her “flash” (“rare among Cambridge girls of the period,” comments Elaine Feinstein, Hughes’s biographer). The day after the party, Plath wrote it up in her journal, glowing with excitement. Jazzed up by the music, she sighted her prey and described what she saw with a surprising turn of phrase: “Then the worst happened…” She meant the “big, dark” and “hunky” boy she had been asking about. He had spotted her. They were shouting to one another above the noise, and the first words Hughes heard from her were from his own poetry. “You like?” Hughes asked as he backed her into another room and sloshed some brandy into her glass. Then he kissed her—“bang smash on the mouth,” ripping her hair band and earrings while barking, “I shall keep.” The curt wording Plath records in her journal sharpens the sense of Hughes’s ability to cut through the party palaver, the politenesses of Cambridge he was known to flout. When he kissed her on the neck, she retaliated with a long, hard bite on his cheek that drew a line of blood. Hughes might as well have stepped right out of a Brontë novel. She could not stop obsessing about him. She had already been told he was the biggest seducer in Cambridge. Thoughts of Hughes were almost enough to drive away her longing for Richard Sassoon.