And yet Sylvia was not without resources. Her urge for order asserted itself. On 3 January, Clarissa Roche arrived for a visit to find the flat tidy—although soon Sylvia admitted it was all too much for her. Still, she refused Clarissa’s invitation to accompany her to Kent for a stay with the Roches. No, Sylvia said, she would manage somehow. Trevor Thomas saw the other side: the look of terror in Sylvia’s face and her helplessness, which was becoming a nuisance, since she expected Thomas to help her cope with household crises. But his son said, “Can’t you see Daddy, she’s very sad? It’s in her eyes.” Children are often more observant, Thomas wrote in his memoir about Plath.

Sylvia continued to write, finding time by putting Frieda in nursery school for three hours a day and catching moments for composition while Nicholas napped. It was a virtuoso performance that kept her going—for a while. She had something to prove. To go home, to go to Clarissa, spelled doom, because in Sylvia’s mind writing on her own had become a lifeline. To give up the flat—even temporarily—when the writing was going so well meant becoming a patient again, the Sylvia of ten years earlier.

Sylvia stumbled her way to local shops, afraid of falling on the ice. Lacking snow shovels, shopkeepers resorted to using boards to scoop out narrow paths. In her flat, Sylvia was besieged high and low, with a stain creeping along her freshly painted white ceiling and her bathtub filling with murky water (the result of a frozen waste pipe). She pondered the mysteries of British plumbing. The wallpaper sagged. Busted pipes, she was told—and not a plumber to be had when everyone suffered the same plight. Roofs could cope with rain, but not the heavy weight of the snow. Workman pitched the snow off the roof but left behind a faulty gutter right by Sylvia’s bedroom window, resulting in a drip, drip, drip that she compared to Chinese water torture. It soon became apparent that this historic house had, in foul weather, revealed itself to be in an abysmal state of disrepair.

Sylvia blamed no one for deceiving her—after all, her neighbors were putting up with the same problems—but she had a nagging suspicion, never far from the thoughts of someone brought up in middle-class America, that the insalubrious British climate fostered a defect in the British sensibility, which like Ted, was all too willing to tolerate the haphazard. Americans plan for this sort of eventuality, she told the workmen. No American handyman would have stood with a bucket trying to catch the water cascading from the ceiling with the “embarrassed air of covering an obscenity.”

Outside, Sylvia contemplated the maze of different pipes—really quite an extraordinary puzzle to an American used to plumbing that was out of sight, behind walls or underground. She was advised to plug her drains every night to prevent more freezing. The agent in charge of her property asked: Had no one from the water board told her as much? No, she replied, perplexed. He advised heating the pipes by any means (including candles!) and running hot water through them several times a day. When she poured a bucket of hot water on pipes outside her balcony, Trevor Thomas shouted up to say there was a puddle on his kitchen floor. “The agent is a fool,” Thomas told her.

Miraculously, a plumber showed up. But then came the power cuts. It was just like the Blitz—a doughty time for hardy survivors of the war, but no pleasure for Sylvia Plath. The lights went out. Trevor Thomas told her the interruption of service had been announced in the newspapers. Hadn’t she read about it? With the gas still working, she managed to cook meals, while she wrapped her children in winter clothes.

Midway through this winter siege, Sylvia wrote her mother, admitting her flu-induced exhaustion, but claiming she was pulling out of it. Day nurses had helped with the children, who were also afflicted with colds and fevers. She called the weather “filthy”— a good word to describe her overwhelming sense of disgust and gloom, made worse by the two-month wait to get her phone service installed. Finding an au pair was another trial. Sylvia had done her best to make fun of her plight in a commissioned article, “Snow Blitz.” Trevor Thomas, not a very sympathetic observer of Plath’s last days, resented the gloss she put on her plight by removing the expressions of sheer panic he witnessed.

Sylvia leveled with Aurelia: She realized she had lost her “identity under the steamroller of decisions and responsibilities of this last half year, with the babies a constant demand.” Sylvia did not say, but it almost did not matter what she thought of Ted at this point. He was not there to help her, and he had come to represent the man who was not there, not the man she had dreamed of in an early Smith College journal, the man who “admired me, who understood me as much as I understood myself.” How awful to realize that she was “starting from scratch” in this “first year” of her new life.

Ted would later say that in Sylvia’s last weeks they were planning a reconciliation. Susan Alliston, now in Ted’s confidence, recorded in her journal her surprise at how much he talked about himself and Sylvia, “so personally.” She noted his remark that the “exclusivity of the relationship killed something—the keeping always on the same plane, and that she is an absolutist—will not accept a compromise.” But now that Sylvia was on her own and had to do everything for herself…? Alliston does not complete the thought, instead observing that she did not think Ted wanted a divorce. “It makes no difference,” she adds cryptically.

Sylvia sounded wistful when she wrote of earning enough from writing to support herself. She yearned for a “windfall” that “a really successful novel” would bring to relieve her “ghastly vision of rent bleeding away year after year.” The temporariness of it all after such a long decade of hard work defeated her. Time was running out. “But I need time,” Sylvia told her mother. Sylvia prescribed an antidote for herself, but it does not sound convincing: “I guess I just need somebody to cheer me up by saying I’ve done all right so far.”

An alarmed Aurelia had no trouble reading the signs and got word to a friend in London to contact Sylvia. Pat Goodall sent a reassuring letter to Aurelia, reporting that on 19 January, a “bitter cold day,” she went to see Sylvia and was met by a “bright and eager American expression” that immediately made Pat feel at home. The visit was worthwhile. Unfortunately, Pat mistook the point of this animation. Sylvia insisted that Pat and her husband stay for tea, while she “NEVER STOPPED TALKING!” The bright and cheerful children seemed well. They had all recovered from the flu, Sylvia assured Pat. They had a doctor who was “an absolute Saint.” Sylvia seemed all the more remarkable to Pat, because “Saturday was the dreariest of winter days, yet inside her flat life seemed warm and cheery.” Plath, a magnificent performer, loved to put on a show. Visits cheered her but did nothing to change her predicament. This bleak period is palpable in a poem completed on 28 January. “Sheep in Fog” envisages a heaven “Starless and fatherless, a dark water.” The same day this dreary season made its appearance in “The Munich Mannequins”: “The snow drops its pieces of darkness”—such a stark line annihilates the prosy pleasantries of “Snow Blitz.”

Respectable to mixed reviews of The Bell Jar began appearing and did little to hearten Plath, especially since the novel had not found a publisher in America. In an introduction to the first publication of Plath’s journals, Ted Hughes recalls, “If she felt any qualms at the public release of this supercharged piece of her autobiography, she made no mention of it at the time, either in conversation or in her diary.” Although he concedes that certain reviews exasperated and dismayed her, “they did not visibly deflate her.” But Sylvia confided to her friend Jillian Becker that the British reviews were discouraging, a real blow because when Sylvia saw the book in proof, she realized it was no potboiler and had high hopes for it.