The man attributes his slowly emerging sense of himself to Judas and the high priests who “saved me from my own salvation.” In effect, Christ repudiates any sense of divinity he once claimed, now regarding himself as merely a man. Sylvia’s own near death, as she would say after she met Ted Hughes, had been necessary in order to transform her into the woman who attracted him. Her painful experience had prepared her to go on. She had rejected the supposed salvation of her summer in New York, just as the man who died rejects “my own excessive salvation.”

Yet it is precisely his desire to free himself from this “excessive need for salvation” that attracts the wandering man to the woman who tends the temple of Isis. Indeed, she looks upon him as the lost Osiris who can fecundate the goddess’s womb. Plath identified with Isis in her attraction to the mangod, the Isis whom Lawrence describes as searching and grieving for her beloved in “tormented ecstasy.” The Plath of the journals realizes at this point that she has discovered in Lawrence’s text the very dynamic of life she has painstakingly reassembled out of the fragments of a woman who died. Lawrence’s description of Isis finding her beloved bit by bit, “heart and head and limbs and body,” is the equivalent of Plath’s experience on all those dates and drives with Myron and Richard, Dick and Gordon—each assignation undertaken in search of another piece of the man who would make her whole. “For she was Isis of the subtle lotus, the womb which waits submerged and in bud, waits for the touch of that other inward sun that streams its rays from the loins of the male Osiris,” Lawrence wrote. “‘The goddess is great,’” the man says to the lady who tends Isis’s shrine. Sylvia was awaiting the man who would, in so many words, say the same to her. In Lawrence’s version of rebirth, the man may see himself as an Osiris-candidate, so to speak, but what he experiences is the “greater day of the human consciousness.” And it is that sense of speaking to and for the world that Plath treasured in the story Lawrence had to tell. Perhaps the most thrilling moment for Plath was that when the man felt “his own sun dawned, and sent its fire running along his limbs, so that his face shone unconsciously.”

No wonder Krook’s class seemed to galvanize Sylvia Plath. To her mother on 9 March, Sylvia wrote one of those patented sunshiny letters. She describes how the light came flooding through her windows into a room she especially treasured for its window seat, where she often perched writing poetry. Full of affection and enclosing two poems, including “Pursuit,” Sylvia effervesced. She noted the Blakean, hypnotic quality of “Pursuit,” emphasizing the “terrible beauty of death,” the result of having lived fully and intensely. Although Hughes was the primary inspiration for “Pursuit,” biographers have overlooked Plath’s disclosure that she associated the fires of pain in that poem with Sassoon’s furious soul, which had also ravished her. She did not mention Hughes in this letter to Aurelia, but perhaps she thought of him when she yearned for a man who could “overcome” Richard’s image. Sounding very much like Marilyn Monroe, who would soon wed Arthur Miller, Plath called herself a princess awaiting her white knight, employing the same imagery Monroe used in sessions with her psychiatrist.

Writing to Elinor Friedman Klein, on that same day Sylvia compared Rhett Butler’s Gone with the Wind rejection of Scarlett O’Hara (“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!”) to Sassoon’s desire to make his fortune and to give Plath her freedom—just when she had readied herself to surrender to him! The tone of this letter—“You have got to listen to this, because I am full of it”—is reminiscent of a late-night dorm room confession, as Plath spills out her confession of how Sassoon has set her raving, writing a letter that rivals Scarlett’s plea that Rhett not abandon her. Sassoon was even talking about enlisting in the army, just as Rhett had forsaken Scarlett to join the retreating Confederates. Sylvia explained to her dear Elly that she had asked Sassoon if they could have a spring together in France and Italy before he got himself killed. She even imagined, as she was imploring him to see her, that like Rhett, Sassoon had a mistress on the side. In return, she received a postcard from her “noble” lover saying he would someday reappear, “crashing out of the ether.”

At this point, Sassoon was not so much a real man as an obsession, an image that could be replaced only by “some big, brilliant combination of all the men I have ever met…” Ted Hughes is not mentioned in this letter; apparently he still seemed unreal so long as her relationship with Sassoon remained unresolved. Richard still loved Sylvia, as he would later make clear, but he refused to act on the urgency of her need for him. The more she pressed, the more he resisted. Before 9 March, the Sylvia Plath of the journal raved about Richard’s retreat, but the Sylvia Plath of the letter to Elly shows some of that self-mocking talent that critic Caroline King Barnard Hall has traced in the poetry, early and late (including “Circus in Three Rings”), that sends up Plath’s imagination of disaster.

The letters to Elly and Aurelia signaled that Plath was pulling out of her obsessive-depressive state. She was looking forward to a visit from Gordon Lameyer. Her Fulbright, renewed for another year, would give her enough money to host Aurelia for a visit, and in Dorothea Krook she had at last found a brilliant, attractive supervisor whom she could match her wits against. Gary Haupt, a Fulbright student from Yale, was a huge source of comfort, “sweet, if pedantic.” He had stood by her through the ordeal of an operation to remove a very painful cinder from her eye.

For once, Sylvia’s journal and her letters seem to be working in tandem as, having minimized her academic commitments, she confidently plotted her life as a writer in Europe. She wanted to write a novel that would include a story of love, suicide, and recovery, with perhaps a collegiate setting and incorporating her letters to Sassoon. Singing as she rode her bike, in a display of renewed appetite she picked up four sandwiches.

At first, Sylvia did not realize that Ted Hughes was on her trail. Then, while biking on 10 March, she learned from a Cambridge friend that the previous night Hughes had tried to look her up, throwing stones at the wrong window. Hughes, a recent Cambridge graduate, visited often. But he had a day job in London as, in his words, a “shit-shoveller” for the J. Arthur Rank film studio. He read scripts all day to determine which ones might be adapted for the screen. At the news of his reappearance, a flustered Sylvia mumbled to her friend that Hughes should “drop by, or something,” and rode off. Her nearly speechless excitement is evident in a journal entry that sputters: “He. O he.” She repeated, “please let him come” like a “black marauder.” Let him play Ulysses to her Penelope. She even quotes lines from “Pursuit” as she awaits being taken. She was dressing in violent, fierce colors and working herself up into a state that she compared to writing “Mad Girl’s Love Song” and “Circus in Three Rings.” Those poems reflect just how intense her apocalyptic inner world could be, conjuring images of catastrophe—of the worst happening, as she described her first sight of Hughes. She reveled in straining her emotions to the utmost, even as she realized that by imagining disaster she might also find a way to save herself. Unless brought to the brink, she would never know just how great she could become. The previous night she dreamed of herself as “Isis bereaved, Isis in search.” She finds the suave “dark one” grinning behind a newspaper. The dark man turns out to be Richard Sassoon. Then another dark man, thinking she is a whore, accosts her in the street as she runs after Richard. Waking from her dream, Plath waited again for his tread on the stairs, all the while dreading what would become of her in Paris, since she was still determined to have one more showdown with Sassoon. She even imagined that without his protection she would be raped.