It never seemed to occur to Sylvia that it would be difficult to replicate the support group she could call on at Court Green. Neighbors, a nanny, and visits from friends had done nicely for her, but she was bent on this London adventure and expected, as she told her mother, to be “self-sufficient.” She was lining up readings and broadcasts, phone service for the flat (she had now reached the final stage of contract negotiations), a stove, and other amenities. During this period she impressed Ted Hughes, who while still decrying her “death-ray quality,” also told his brother, Gerald, that they had worked out a more amicable relationship after she arrived in London. Did Sylvia’s attraction to Alvarez also figure in her resurgence?

Between 12 December, the day Sylvia moved out of Court Green, and the end of January, she wrote little poetry, concentrating instead on a novel, “Doubletake,” that dealt with Ted’s desertion. She read biographies and contemporary women novelists, including Doris Lessing, whose new novel, The Golden Notebook, had just been published. When Plath met Lessing, the latter retreated from her importunate admirer. A better match was made with Emily Hahn, a New Yorker writer treasured for her ebullient, welcoming attitude. Hahn, a single mother and a shrewd survivor of hardship, a world traveler and a hardy raconteur, would have been a tonic for Plath, who was searching for new role models.

As Plath told interviewer Peter Orr in late October, she was shifting her attention to prose, wishing to engage with a broad range of subjects—stimulated no doubt by the historical biographies she had been reading. Some of her greatest poems were yet before her, but she seems to have sensed that this phase of her career might be winding down. She awaited the appearance of The Bell Jar, to be published in mid-January as the work of Victoria Lucas. Owing to the novel’s autobiographical nature, Plath thought it best to use a pseudonym.

Sylvia had reason to believe her London life would be a success. It was easier than ever for friends to visit, she had the trusted Dr. Horder close by, the zoo minutes away for the children’s amusement, and proximity to the BBC, where she had good connections. Delays in furnishing the flat, acquiring phone service, and finding an au pair did little to dampen her enthusiasm. She happily painted and cleaned her new home. The weather had not yet turned against her, and Ted’s visits to the flat to see the children had not yet riled her up. Even so, her life seemed to take on a relentless, unremitting quality that she tried to interrupt with lively letters home.

On 14 December, Sylvia wrote to her Aunt Dot about the children’s delight at the zoo, and the shopkeepers who remembered her from the days she had spent in the neighborhood with Ted just a few years earlier. It was like a village really, but with all the conveniences of London. She made even the hassles of moving seem elevating. Sylvia sounded English, but she craved connection with her homeland. “You have no notion how much your cheery letters mean!” she told her aunt. Aurelia sent chatty letters about family and friends and assured Sylvia she was updating Mrs. Prouty about recent developments.

That same day Sylvia wrote her mother that she had never been happier. Even dashing about to get the electricity and gas connected, while her door blew shut with the keys inside, was transformed into a “comedy of errors.” At the time, though, locking herself out had undone her, according to her neighbor Trevor Thomas, who recalled Sylvia’s hysteria. Yet she spoke as though having a five-year lease guaranteed five years of happiness. She imagined Yeats’s spirit blessing her. And why not? Al Alvarez had just told her that Ariel should win the Pulitzer Prize. She had a study that faced the rising sun. At night she joyously watched the full moon from her balcony. Everyone, it seemed, was a darling—or at least obliging—in her catalogue of good fortune.

A week later nothing had changed, as Sylvia detailed for Aurelia the new furnishings and furniture and flowerpots, and more new clothes (made possible by Aunt Dot’s generous seven hundred dollar gift and a one hundred dollar check from Mrs. Prouty). “You should see me nipping around London,” she assured her worried mother. Aurelia suspected that all this frenzied activity simply masked her daughter’s depression—or so Aunt Dot had confided in a letter to Sylvia. Sylvia amped up her enthusiasm: “The weather has been blue and springlike.” That would change.

Then came Alvarez’s devastating Christmas Eve visit, which he has written about in The Savage God. Sylvia wanted more than supportive criticism from him. His understated published account suggests she wanted an affair. But other evidence suggests that the bond between them was much deeper than that. In a letter Olwyn Hughes wrote to Alvarez on 9 June 1988, in an effort to secure an interview for Anne Stevenson, Olwyn mentions reading Sylvia’s journal, written just before her Christmas encounter with Alvarez. Olywn tells Alvarez about a journal entry in which Sylvia cautions herself to relax so as not to “scare you [Alvarez] off.” Sylvia’s admonition to herself, as Olwyn reports it, is remarkably similar to the poet’s 1 April 1956, journal entry, in which she exhorts herself to “be more subdued” and quiet. “Don’t blab too much.” Olwyn refers to the “lost” journal, full of Sylvia’s suffering but also her “jubilation” over her work, including two chapters—one of which recounted the traumatic Wevill weekend visit in May 1962—she had drafted of a new novel. Then Olwyn mentions the “episode with you [Alvarez]” and Richard Murphy’s failure to respond to Plath’s plans to secure a cottage in Ireland for the winter. Olwyn clearly alludes to Plath’s romantic attachment to Alvarez, which Olwyn regards as “one of the keys” to understanding Sylvia’s final days. In effect, Olwyn complicates the story considerably, making it not just about her brother Ted, but also about Alvarez. What exactly is Olwyn saying when she adds that she could understand why Alvarez “wouldn’t want to descend to such indiscretion”? Olwyn assures him that Sylvia told no one about her personal relationship with Alvarez—although how Olwyn could know this is not clear, unless Sylvia said so in that lost journal.

In his reply of 10 June 1988, Alvarez adamantly refused to see Stevenson and “tell all,” expressing disdain for her “languidly researched” work. What else is there to tell? When I put the question to him for this book, he replied, “She was in love with me.” He would say no more, except to repeat what he has already written: He could not sleep with Sylvia because he was then involved with Anne, his future wife. Alvarez regarded Ted as a friend he would not betray; in fact, Ted had slept a few nights on Alvarez’s sofa, talking over his troubles with his estranged wife. And Sylvia wanted more from Alvarez than he was willing to deliver and more than he is willing to say, even now.

Sylvia’s response to Alvarez’s relative coolness was surely more than just disappointment. Like Hughes, Alvarez had championed the poet and the woman. In the most searching study of the Plath/Alvarez affaire, an article that Alvarez himself endorses, William Wooten writes: “Alvarez was now appreciating poems Plath’s husband had not read. Sending poems to Alvarez had become both an intimate act, making the editor a confidant in a marriage breakdown, and an act that defied intimacy, first of the marriage, then of the confidence.” That Plath could no longer draw near to Alvarez made the last six weeks of her life all the more agonizing.

The children had colds when Sylvia next wrote to her mother on 26 December after Christmas dinner with friends. The holiday made her homesick. Snow was falling, a winter scene she compared to an “engraving out of Dickens.” At first, this change from the soggy, wet winter she had anticipated cheered her. But by 2 January, the snow began to pile up. Everything had turned to sludge and then frozen. No snowplows swept through streets in a land that rarely saw appreciable snow. Still no phone. Still 103 degree fevers for Sylvia. No central heating. Dr. Horder prescribed a tonic for Sylvia, who had lost twenty pounds over the summer. “I am in the best of hands,” Sylvia assured her mother. But the chill had set in. It seemed like England had been engulfed in a new ice age. That same day, Sylvia wrote dejectedly to Marcia Brown that she felt “utterly flattened” by the last six months of life without Ted. As she had done with Warren and his wife, Maggie, she wrote to friends, urging them to come for a spring visit. She was lonely in London and feeling like a “desperate mother.”