By mid-November, Sylvia had a draft of The Bell Jar in hand and was busy fiddling with details that would disguise her all-too-literal rendering of people and places. Her publisher worried about libel, an especially vexing problem in England, where the onus is on author and publisher to prove they have not libeled the plaintiff, whereas in America the burden of proof is on the plaintiff. At least Aurelia was not going to sue her daughter, Sylvia said: In the novel, the mother is “dutiful” and “hard-working,” with a “beastly” and “ungrateful” daughter. With the novel virtually completed, Sylvia swore her editor to secrecy, since the Saxton grant was supposed to be for fiction she had not yet finished.

With The Bell Jar, Plath was finally able to put her own experience in perspective as the story of what success meant in 1950s America to her alter-ego, Esther Greenwood: “I was supposed to be the envy of thousands of other college girls just like me all over America who wanted nothing more than to be tripping about in those same size seven patent leather shoes I’d bought in Bloomingdale’s one lunch hour with a black patent leather belt and black patent leather pocket-book to match.” Esther looks the part, with her perfectly put together ensemble like those of the other magazine guest editors with their “all-American bone structures.” The term all-American, usually reserved for superior college athletes, here suggests the conventionality with which this all-star team is assembled. Plath reduced the number of actual guest editors from twenty to twelve, the number of the apostles—in this case, devotees of American drive and energy. Only Esther has lost her ambition, and what troubles her is that very lack of aspiration. She cannot simply be. She has to become something more, and when the zeal to be great deserts her, she is left with nothing.

With children, a home, and a husband, Plath was able to confront her earlier self. But as Ted Hughes wrote in his introduction to her journals, while a “new self” had created her mature poetry and her novel, it could not “ultimately save her.” If one interprets The Bell Jar as, in a sense, Sylvia turning her back “on an enemy who seems safely defeated, and is defeated,” her victory may well be, Hughes speculates, the “most dangerous moment of all.” Not always the keenest reader of his wife’s mind-set, here Hughes seems to have got it right. She mistakenly thought that with The Bell Jar she had put her trauma behind her.

Esther is demoralized, in part, by the standardized America that Hughes so detested. She rejects Buddy Willard, modeled after Dick Norton, because he has no intuition. She scorns his “good marks,” but then turns this hostility upon herself, noting that after “nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race.” Unlike Doreen, who does have intuition and does take chances, Esther suffers from a failure of nerve and a paralyzing indecisiveness that she tries to remedy with reckless behavior, resulting in a nearly successful rape she has invited in a desperate effort to “go the whole way.”

Esther makes it through her time of trial, rejecting the facile advice of Joan Gilling, whose false recovery from a mental breakdown ends when Joan kills herself. Esther is not cured, any more than Plath’s demons had been banished. Indeed, as Esther observes in the novel, “How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?” Indeed, Ted Hughes would use the metaphor of the bell jar more than once in Birthday Letters to suggest the return of Plath’s furies.

“Frieda moos & baas & peeps back at cows, sheep & birds,” Sylvia reported in a holiday card to Ann Davidow and her husband, Leo. In fact, Sylvia sent out most of her Christmas cards by 7 December by “ordinary mail” at considerable savings. It might be good for Frieda, Sylvia supposed, to attend Sunday school, even if she was bound to reject the dogma. Plath suggested it was better to have a religious background to rebel against than no background at all. Writing to Aurelia, Sylvia confessed that she found Cold War politics deeply disturbing and criticized the harsh, threatening rhetoric President Kennedy aimed at Nikita Khrushchev. She feared for Frieda, growing up in such a self-destructive atmosphere. The work of right-wing organizations like the John Birch Society and the growth of the military-industrial complex convinced her that America was on the wrong course. She thought the British misguided to ally themselves with the United States. She would have preferred a neutral United Kingdom. Even so, Sylvia rejoiced in receiving the Ladies Home Journal from her mother—especially the recipes in the magazine, since the English equivalents were “things like ‘Lard and Stale Bread Pie, garnished with Cold Pigs Feet’ or ‘Left-Over Pot Roast in Aspic.’” The lack of central heating was taking its toll, even though they had four electric heaters now in addition to the coal stove. But Frieda thrived, and on balance Sylvia believed they were better off than in an overheated American home. She reveled in a traditional Christmas, complete with tree trimming and a display of fifty Christmas cards.

Near term, Sylvia stopped writing in January 1962, contenting herself with baking and performing other household routines while awaiting the imminent arrival of her second child. Finally born a few days late on 17 January, Nicholas was a big baby. At over nine pounds he was more than two pounds heavier than Frieda had been, and he felt like it, Sylvia reported to her mother. Even though her labor took longer this time, she seemed perfectly at home with her midwife and a gas cylinder she tapped into by applying a mask to her face. Sylvia described the birth as an epic event, with the bluish-looking boy shooting out of her onto the bed in a “tidal wave of water,” drenching her, Ted, the midwife, and the doctor. Frieda stood by, safety pins in hand, kissing the baby. Ted thought he had taken it all in stride, but the next day, he admitted in a letter to a friend, he was exhausted. Births, he assured his correspondent, took as much out of the father as the mother.

Sylvia emerged from her “cow-state” and resumed writing in February, relieved that she could give Ted a respite from so much childcare. Although the night feedings depleted her, having babies, she told her mother, was wonderful, and she wished she could just go “on and on.” She felt reborn. Nicholas seemed more docile than Frieda had been as a baby. Frieda was now the household terror, tearing off pieces of wallpaper when she found a niche that fit her fingernail and uprooting bulbs. Sylvia tried to keep her daughter busy by showing her how to garden, a “pacifying pastime,” as she put it in a letter to Ann and Leo Goodman. Nicholas was proving to be a “true Hughes”: “craggy, dark, quiet & smiley.” Too much wet and windy weather in March, however, had Sylvia yearning for a full spring. Finally, her letters to Aurelia began to mention a novel, “something amusing.”

After a cold and sunless March, Sylvia, afflicted with chilblains (as she wrote the Roches on 12 March) and busy with expensive repairs to the house, looked forward to the spring and visitors, including (she hoped) the Roches and a BBC crew coming to interview her. Ted was taking day trips to London to see publishers and work on BBC programs. She was picking six hundred daffodils a week and taking them to market. Baby Nick, as Frieda called him, was sleeping in his pram among the daisies. Sylvia could not have presented a more idyllic picture for her mother, who was preparing to visit that summer. To the Roches, she offered a more sobering report on the toll the winter, which produced temperatures lower than forty degrees inside parts of the house, had taken on her. She was working, she told them, on a “grossly amateur novel” (The Bell Jar).