Sylvia returned to her Devon home on 30 October only long enough to make preparations for her flat-hunting trip the first week of November. Although very much on her own, she accepted monetary support from Hughes, and he joined her on 4 November in the search for London lodgings. These fitful meetings upset her. Friends saw her cry and then surmount her grief with rage over his treachery. This behavior, like the poems she was then writing, played like a piece of music, the descending and ascending notes reflecting a huge emotional range. At parties, events, and various get-togethers, Sylvia, a prodigious performer, orchestrated her break with Ted, making it an operatic public affair. Like her urge to publish, to make herself known to the world, which had begun at such an early age, the compulsion to brand her husband in the open got the best of her.

Ted was behaving in a similar fashion, announcing his separation from Sylvia and attracting the attention of other women. On 1 November, he met anthropologist and poet Susan Alliston, who recorded in her journal his declaration that “Marriage is not for me.” Alliston thought he had “got it in for Anglo Saxon women, perhaps too cold. He’s now with a non-Anglo-Saxon”—a reference, no doubt, to Assia. He was already sizing up Alliston, though, admiring her long legs, which he later mentioned in his romantic introduction to her poems and journals. He told her that marriage was not for her either (she had recently separated from her husband). Two weeks later, she was at The Lamb, a Bloomsbury pub, trying to “beautify myself up a little” and hoping Ted would turn up.

On destiny’s doorstep, Sylvia discovered her dream home: 23 Fitzroy Road in Primrose Hill, not far from Dr. John Horder, who was treating her infected thumb. She was alone as she read the plaque noting that W. B. Yeats had lived there. This was it. She immediately got to work securing a five-year lease and raced home to open her edition of Yeats’s Collected Plays, which obliged her with this passage: “Get wine and food to give you strength and courage, and I will get the house ready.” Although the obstacles for a single mother obtaining a flat that others wanted were formidable, and negotiations would prove complicated, the flat represented the assertion of a new, insurgent self. She contrasted herself with Ted, whom she now portrayed as an establishment man caught in “petty fetters” and “bribes,” the world of London silks he had always scorned—a rather prophetic vision of a man who would become poet laureate.

On 7 November, readying herself for the move to London, an exultant Sylvia wrote Aurelia from Court Green about the new flat, which included “two floors with three bedrooms, upstairs, lounge, kitchen, and bath downstairs and a balcony garden!” As usual, she could not help overdoing it, vowing to be a “marvelous mother” who regretted nothing. She spent more than a page on domestic details, including her discovery of a “fabulous hairdresser.” She loved her look, and it had cost her only $1.50. She liked to measure out her happiness in monetary terms, an aspect of the practical Plath that Hughes had deplored but depended upon. Ted had not even recognized her at the train station. No longer in his “shadow,” she would make it on her own and be recognized for her own genius. She even felt magnanimous, if dismissive, about Assia, who had only her well-paid ad agency job and her vain wish to be a writer. Sylvia envied Ted and Assia “nothing.” Men now stared in the street at her new fashionable self. She would appear a “knockout” at the Royal Court summer theater program devoted to poetry. Ted had disdained her love of stylish clothes and thought spending sums on ensembles extravagant. Sylvia, on the other hand, was a center court poet. She dreamed of eventually buying a London home if she ever published a “smash-hit novel.”

Sylvia was hard hit in the second week of November when The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly rejected several of her recent poems—the very ones that would appeal to posterity. But she rebounded, assembling forty of her best works into a manuscript with a title that would make her name, “Ariel, and other Poems,” a seeming tribute to Shakespeare’s freewheeling and enchanting androgynous sprite. The poems reflected a fiercely feminine spirit abetted by a regiment of women, including her old friend Clarissa Roche, her nanny Susan O’Neill Rowe, and Ruth Fainlight (a writer and the wife of novelist Allen Sillitoe). These women stimulated Sylvia to write about motherhood as in itself a courageous, life-affirming choice—precisely the decision that a woman like Assia, so Sylvia believed, had avoided.

That fraught telephone call in July continued to gnaw at the poet, who in “The Fearful” (16 November), brooded on a woman who would pretend to be a man, hollowing out her voice so that it sounded dead. The woman thinks that a baby will rob her of her beauty (Sylvia had heard Assia, worried about losing her beauty, did not want children). “She would rather be dead than fat,” so fearful is this woman who has turned her body over to a man. Plath would have made an excellent biographer. She had scoped out Assia and had a shrewd understanding of her rival’s tastes and temperament. Later, after Plath’s death, Assia would have access to Plath’s journals and see firsthand how the poet had nailed her.

When Clarissa arrived the next day at Court Green for a visit, Sylvia embraced a friend she had previously called an “earth mother,” exclaiming more than once, “You’ve saved my life.” “The Fearful” had brought on another round of rage against Ted. Clarissa caught her at a weak moment, when the burdens of caring for Frieda and Nicholas, for all Sylvia’s bravado, were wearing her out. And yet Clarissa also recalls their raucous laughter. Plath had a hearty laugh. By the time Clarissa departed on 19 November, Sylvia was again in high spirits, writing to her mother that same day as a busy professional woman, assembling her book of poetry and dealing with all manner of correspondence related to her work. She had time, however, to deck herself out with several new outfits and jewelry that she described in detail. These items were essential, making her feel “like a new woman,” although she remained in suspense about the London flat, since her references and financials were still being reviewed.

On Thanksgiving Day, Sylvia wrote again, mentioning her bad cold, made worse by chores such as lugging coal buckets and ashbins. She still worried about obtaining the flat, since she had “so much against me—being a writer, the ex-wife of a successful writer, being an American, young, etc., etc.” She was working like a navvy to prepare for her move, and that activity had disrupted her writing schedule, except for production of potboiling stuff that brought in some income. She was reviewing children’s books for New Statesman, but also reviewing Malcolm Elwin’s Lord Byron’s Wife, which seemed to reflect her state of mind. Although she acknowledged that “Byron the lion was undeniably poor husband-stuff,” she attributes the trouble in his marriage not only to his insufferable wife, Anna Isabella Milbanke, who always had to be “in the right,” but also to Byron’s sister, Augusta, with whom he had an incestuous relationship not unlike what Sylvia had insinuated (without any proof) was the case with Ted and Olwyn. Did Sylvia see that in her more self-righteous moods she resembled Anna Isabella—as Sylvia memorably put it—fixed in the “ego-screws of pride”? Sylvia, who would drop as much as twenty pounds during her separation from Ted, quotes Augusta’s account of Annabella’s wasting away in Byron’s absence: “She is positively reduced to a Skeleton—pale as ashes—a deep hollow tone of voice & a calm in her manner quite supernatural.”

Sylvia’s description of Augusta as a “hectic if unsuccessful Pandarus” seems eerily prophetic of the role Olwyn would later play vis-à-vis Assia Wevill (see chapter 8). Sylvia deplored Annabella’s “refusal to grant her spouse an interview (she never saw Byron again), let alone try to make a second go of it.” Is it too much to suppose that Sylvia, seeing the unfortunate consequences of Annabella’s adamantine attitude, decided not to cut off contact with her own lion simply because he was in the wrong? Trevor Thomas, who occupied the flat downstairs, would later observe her rages, which were an “ambivalent blend of blame, jealousy and wanting him back. She had not entirely given up hope of paradise regained.”