On 21 June in a letter to Olive Higgins Prouty, Hughes called Sylvia a marvelous mother who calmly fed her baby and exhibited endless patience. Sylvia returned the compliment three days later in a letter to Aurelia, extolling Ted as a “marvel of understanding” who was “wonderful with the baby.” They took turns working in the Merwin study—mornings for Sylvia and afternoons for Ted. Both poets gave public readings, and Ted continued to earn good fees for reading his poems and those of others on the BBC, which also produced two of his verse plays. He had also begun selling his manuscripts to dealers and to Indiana University. In this way, the couple cobbled together an income. They attended a Faber & Faber cocktail party, where a proud Sylvia watched while Ted was photographed next to W. H. Auden, establishing Ted’s place in the next generation of Faber poets. That her destiny seemed bound up with London seemed confirmed on the day she happened to walk down Fitzroy Road and saw a freehold house for sale, an unusual occurrence since most dwellings went for ninety-nine year leases. This was the street on which Yeats lived, Sylvia told her mother. The couple, still relying on Ted’s Guggenheim money and a thousand dollars she drew out of their Wellesley bank account, could not afford to buy a house, but she hoped that someday they would find just such a residence to own.

On 22 August, Ted wrote Aurelia and Warren a chatty letter about visiting his parents in Yorkshire. He needed a respite from the hurly-burly of London. He described a fetching Sylvia, who had been reading Alan Moorehead’s book about the Gallipoli campaign and eagerly questioned his father, a survivor of that catastrophe. Father and son rarely spoke about this traumatic episode from William Hughes’s youth, so watching his usually taciturn father open up to Sylvia proved quite entertaining to Ted. Long walks and time spent in Edith Hughes’s garden soothed Sylvia, she reported to her mother.

Returning to London a fortnight later, Sylvia received a BBC invitation to read her work on the radio. With Ted’s work in demand and her hope that he might write a popular play, they dreamed of a car and a country home, complete with a loom, a kiln, a book press, and other items of handcraft. They both thought they might strike it rich if he could write a play to suit the volatile spirit of the times, as Arnold Wesker and the other “angry young men” were doing. Sylvia even had Ted read Clifford Odets to absorb the working class, proletarian ethos.

On 17 December, just as the couple departed for another holiday in Yorkshire, Sylvia and Ted wrote separate letters to Aurelia and Warren. Ted confirmed Sylvia’s reports of the significant attention his work continued to receive. He also made a point of saying that fatherhood was as much an adjustment for him as motherhood had been for Sylvia. He welcomed the change to family man, but seemed quite taken aback at his status as a public figure. He spoke of his fame as though a great cruelty had been done to him and showed no sign of the exultation that Sylvia experienced in the wake of his literary celebrity. He felt depleted, while Sylvia felt more full of herself. Literary life imprisoned Hughes even as it liberated his wife, but she honored his desire to reject certain kinds of media attention. He turned down, much to his mother’s regret, an invitation to appear on a television program featuring the “poet of the year.” He did not like the idea of being watched. But in the main he believed he had escaped the worst effects of his renown and had emerged, as out of “battlesmoke,” still his own man. In the last month, Sylvia had recovered her momentum, writing five superior poems and energetic stories aimed at the women’s magazine market, Ted reported. He thought these commercial outlets would be good for her, ridding her once and for all of the “arty” mood pieces her Smith professors had promoted. Sylvia really needed to put more action into her stories with killings, births, marriages—stories, in other words, in which things actually happened and were not just thought about. They were working together on plots that would get her stories going. As for his own work, he provides quite a long précis of a play, The House of Aries, which sounded very much in the vein of D. H. Lawrence: an exploration of the tensions between the logical, rational mind and the instinctive animalistic self which, if in conflict within the individual, lead to malaise and yearning for an undaunted savior, a dream figure, an “ideal accomplisher.” Ted worried that his play was excessively abstract. It is, but it also projects precisely the kind of sensibility that moved Sylvia to write that notorious line in “Daddy”: “Every woman adores a fascist.”

The Christmas visit did not go that well, as Sylvia related in part of a letter Aurelia chose not to include in Letters Home. According to Anne Stevenson’s biography, the trouble started when Olywn expressed dismay over Sylvia’s highly critical commentary about someone Olwyn did not know, but who was a poet she admired. To Olwyn, her sister-in-law’s furious reaction only proved the “unwritten rule”: Sylvia was not to be criticized. But surely another interpretation occurred to Sylvia: Why was Olywn judging her, when Olwyn did not even know the party concerned? Wasn’t Olwyn the one who was too quick to judge? Stevenson, working under the heavy burden of Olwyn’s hectoring letters expressing exasperation with the biographer’s handling of events, cut short this acrimonious scene. But the unauthorized Paul Alexander dilates upon it. Sylvia accused Olywn of degrading her and Ted. An enraged Olwyn called Sylvia a “nasty bitch,” and apparently disgusted with Plath’s hearty appetite, made remarks about her overeating at Christmas dinner. And why had Sylvia not put Olwyn up at the Chalcot Square flat when Olwyn has visited London in the spring? Referring to Sylvia as “Miss Plath,” Olwyn announced that she was the “daughter of the house.” A silent Sylvia took Frieda out of Olwyn’s hands, even as Ted’s sister was evidently trying to calm down.

Olwyn later told Alexander that Sylvia had “overreacted to their charged dialogue.” But anyone not beholden to Olywn, anyone who had observed her over many years—and who was willing to speak to a biographer (as Marvin Cohen did with me)—can readily observe that even years after Sylvia’s death, Olwyn still hated her brother’s wife. Indeed, anyone Olwyn perceived as standing in the way of her close connection to Ted was bound to be rejected. Edward Butscher reports that Sylvia told Clarissa Roche that the bond between Olwyn and Ted amounted to “intellectual incest.” In her angrier moments, Sylvia omitted the adjective, Roche confided to Butscher. The higher Sylvia stood in Ted’s estimation—especially after the publication of The Colossus—the more jealous Olwyn became. Never again, Sylvia vowed, would she stay in the same home with Olwyn Hughes.

Sylvia attached great importance to A. Alvarez’s review of The Colossus, which The Observer published on 18 December. “She steers clear of feminine charm, deliciousness, gentility, supersensitivity and the act of being a poetess,” Alvarez wrote. “She simply writes good poetry.” Welcome praise indeed for a poet who believed that, like Ted, she had broken through the constraints that Alvarez thought crippled a good deal of postwar British poetry. That she was holding her own in the intense competition of London literary life (from which Ted Hughes was now retreating, as he dreamed of a country refuge) emboldened her and may have accounted for her caustic expression of superiority that set Olwyn off.

Reviews of The Colossus were outstanding. Critics in prestigious journals and newspapers praised the “virtuoso qualities of her style,” calling her “clever” and “vivacious,” poised and cool, and deserving to be ranked with Ted Hughes and Theodore Roethke. Some of these adjectives could be interpreted as condescending, but read in full the reviews reveal respect and admiration. Of course, even supporters like Alvarez saw certain faults—a desire sometimes to indulge in rhetoric for its own sake, for example—but in the main Plath attracted the approval of important poet-critics like John Wain, Roy Fuller, and A. E. Dyson. A scene in the film Sylvia, in which an English critic dismisses The Colossus as merely the product of a wife married to a more important poet, does not do justice to Plath’s place in the literary world of her time. Ted Hughes, writing to Lucas Myers on 21 January, expressed his satisfaction with Plath’s excellent reviews. Both Ted and Sylvia wrote to Olive Higgins Prouty about their successes, and she, in turn, wrote back warmly, enclosing a check for $150.