But did Sylvia have misgivings? On 4 June, Jane Anderson, having received a warm invitation in March from Sylvia to visit Cambridge, arrived to behold a very “pressured” Plath. Anderson later recalled in a sworn deposition (she was suing Ted Hughes because of a character in the movie version of The Bell Jar based on her) that Sylvia confessed she was in love with a poet who was also a “very sadistic man.” Although Sylvia was concerned about Ted’s relationships with other women and his sadism, she believed, “I can manage that.” To Anderson, Plath appeared to remain anxious over her decision. And Anderson did not know what response to make: to second Sylvia’s decision or to ask her to reconsider it? So Anderson just listened. After a brief tour of Cambridge, the two women parted, leaving Anderson with the impression that Plath, still under considerable tension, was relieved to see her go. They never communicated again. Anderson interpreted the caricature of her as Joan Gilling in The Bell Jar as revenge for her lack of a response to Plath’s momentous plans.

On 13 June, an enraptured couple welcomed Aurelia to London, and at dinner that night they broke the news that they wished to marry immediately. In person, Hughes seemed to be the superman Plath had portrayed with an almost comic book flourish in her correspondence. Tall, dark-featured, and powerfully built, he also seemed in the presence of these two adoring women a gentle giant who had swept down on Sylvia like a god, an Osiris to her Isis. For all his strength, he seemed—then—a pliable consort. He had apparently forsaken the rather dissolute life Sylvia had earlier imagined for him in her journal, and he seemed to have become thoroughly domesticated. He had opened his heart to Sylvia and identified with her dreams and ambitions as no other man had done. Richard Sassoon had thwarted her, Gordon Lameyer had quarreled with her, Eddie Cohen had questioned her, and Myron Klotz and all the rest had let her down by failing to set the bold course of a writing life that Ted now held out to her. All those men were dead to her—or rather pieces of them, like the pieces of Osiris, had now been reconstructed into the stalwart and scintillating figure of Ted Hughes.

Even with Aurelia’s predilection for powerful men, it is still somewhat surprising that she took so quickly to Ted Hughes, whom her daughter had known for just a few months. To be sure, it would have been devastating to deny Sylvia her joy of Ted, especially when the couple put their plans to Aurelia in person. That they had done so, rather than simply announcing their decision in a letter, probably carried weight with Aurelia, who had, in effect, been summoned by this royal couple. She was the queen mother, who would accompany them on the first phase of their European honeymoon and then proceed to visit the sites of her own mother’s early years in Austria.

But didn’t Aurelia wonder whether Sylvia was rushing into a momentous undertaking? Aurelia was never able to tell in print the full story of what she thought of Ted Hughes. Wanting to remain a part of her grandchildrens’ lives, she feared alienating their father. He held the copyright to Sylvia’s letters, which meant that in order to publish Letters Home, Aurelia had to secure his permission. As a result, she scrupulously avoided direct comments on Ted and his marriage to her daughter. But even in private, according to Aurelia’s friend, Richard Larschan, she maintained a deep respect for Ted and a sober awareness that her daughter’s troubled psyche had contributed to the couple’s breakup.

In Letters Home, Aurelia introduces her daughter’s precipitous behavior with a sweeping sentence: “To my complete surprise, three days after landing at Southampton on June 13, 1956, I found myself the sole family attendant at Sylvia’s and Ted’s secret wedding in the Church of St. George the Martyr, London.” Why secret? Sylvia thought that by openly announcing her marriage to Ted she might forfeit her Fulbright scholarship, since she assumed the award was meant for single students. Why surprise? After all, Sylvia had talked up marriage in letters to her mother. But initially the marriage was to have been put off until Sylvia completed her studies, when she would have the opportunity to return home and present her noble man. Now, however, Aurelia had been invited to join in their intrigue, just as Sylvia had always shared with her mother notes and reports about her gentlemen callers and their relative merits and deficiencies. Now, Aurelia was part of her daughter’s conspiracy, one that not even Ted’s parents knew about. And Ted played his own part very well, confiding in Aurelia his concerns about having to teach in order to generate an income. Aurelia had been doing that much of her life, and she candidly told him that sometimes she felt like no more than a jailer.

Why Hughes did not inform his parents or Olwyn, in whom he was wont to confide, has been a puzzle for biographers. Was his sudden involvement with an American student so overwhelming that he wanted more time to figure out what to say? His first letters to Olwyn sound like those of a younger brother with a lot of explaining to do. No one—certainly not Ted’s Cambridge cronies—ever expected him to become a conventional husband, let alone marry an American who seemed to have such a different sensibility from his own. Lucas Myers, profoundly skeptical of Sylvia, saw the secrecy about the marriage as a way for Plath to take complete control, making sure no one could come between her and Hughes. Ted let Sylvia take charge and seemed at no point resistant—even to the idea of setting off on a honeymoon with his mother-in-law. How better to demonstrate his biddable side than to ease himself into Sylvia’s energetic arrangements? This passive side of Hughes (if the couple had any quarrels before their marriage, neither of them vouchsafed as much to others) permitted, indeed encouraged Plath to project an idealized picture of their marriage.

Two days after the marriage, Sylvia wrote to Warren, presenting her union with Hughes as a predictable result of their three months of togetherness, reading and hiking and cooking and writing, side by side. Aurelia had endorsed her daughter’s commitment, and Ted already loved and cared for Aurelia “very much,” said Sylvia, who later told Marcia Brown that her mother behaved “like a young girl—taking pictures, drinking wine etc.” To Warren, Sylvia presented the secret marriage as a necessity. She seemed to revel in the exclusivity of this match: The couple kept to themselves and liked it that way, she wrote her mother on 4 July, shortly after Aurelia had said good-bye to the newlyweds in Paris.

From Madrid on 7 July, Sylvia wrote a letter to Aurelia describing her procession through Europe with Ted as a kind of royal tour: “Wherever Ted and I go people seem to love us.” Working people were drawn to this unaffected couple in a landscape of bold colors and brightness. For the first time in her life, Sylvia felt her sinuses clear. Like Rebecca West in Yugoslavia, Plath claimed to find a paradise in which she was no longer clogged with the factitious burdens of Anglo-American modernity.

On the same day, Ted wrote to his brother in Australia, once and for all renouncing his dream of starting life anew there. It was not the right country in which to develop his writing. Neither was England. Like Plath, Hughes believed Spain had set him free. In the company of an “American poetess” (he seemed to use the word as though describing a princess), he was writing better than ever and more continuously. Sylvia astutely analyzed his work, he reported, and found the faults that he had not yet been prepared to acknowledge. In fact, as part of the Plath program of submissions, he had been successfully published in Poetry and The Nation.

Sylvia continued to write her mother about a fairy-tale honeymoon in Benidorm, a sparkling Spanish coastal town beside the blazing blue Mediterranean Sea. Sylvia was delighted with their quarters in a house even closer to the sea than Grammy’s place in Winthrop. They had a balcony terrace overlooking a seascape that stimulated Sylvia’s sketching and writing. Ted was working on animal fables, while Sylvia plotted stories about Americans abroad that she hoped to place with women’s magazines. The same day (14 July) she wrote to Warren, describing Ted as the “male counterpart” of herself.