In Giving Up, Becker describes Sylvia’s last wracking weekend. The desperate visitor arrived at the Becker home around 2:00 p.m. on Thursday afternoon and announced, “I feel terrible.” Sylvia asked if she could lie down. Jillian led her to an upstairs bedroom, while Frieda and Nicholas played with Jillian’s youngest daughter, Madeleine. At 4 o’clock, Sylvia came downstairs and said she would “rather not go home.” She gave Jillian the keys to the Fitzroy Road flat and asked her to retrieve a number of items for a weekend stay.

Sylvia seemed to settle down after a steak dinner, just as she had done days before when Clarissa Roche visited and prepared a meal. Then Jillian watched her friend down several sleeping pills and waited until Sylvia slept. By 3:30 a.m., Sylvia had awakened and was weeping. For two hours she catalogued her woes—her father’s death and Ted’s betrayal of her with Assia. Jillian remembered Sylvia saying that when she and Ted moved to Court Green, they thought their “ideal life was starting.” Aurelia also became a target. “Sometimes we mentioned our mothers, each of us unforgivingly,” Jillian recalled. “In her case a need to impress her mother had been a driving force. She’d had to present her with success after success. The breakup of her marriage, she believed, was surely seen by her mother as a failure; and even though Aurelia Plath voiced no such judgment, the thought of it infuriated Sylvia. She hated the shame it would require her to feel.” The women remained awake until 5:30 a.m., when Sylvia took an antidepressant and dozed off.

Friday morning Sylvia ate heartily and called Dr. Horder, who was also Becker’s friend. Sylvia turned the phone over to Jillian when he asked to speak with her. “How does she seem to you?” Horder asked. “Depressed,” Jillian replied. He wanted Jillian to make sure Sylvia took her pills. It was also important, he emphasized, that Sylvia look after her children. She needed a sense of purpose and responsibility.

Becker’s own account of what happened next is far less dramatic than the versions reported elsewhere. Sylvia seems to have had a tranquil Friday and Saturday after her troubling night on Thursday. She went out Saturday evening, but did not tell the Beckers about her plans, and she returned without disturbing their sleep. But according to Ted’s diary, he met Sylvia at the Fitzroy flat Friday night after receiving a note from her that had arrived about 3:30 p.m. He called it a “farewell love letter.” In just two sentences, she announced that she was leaving the country and would never see him again. But what she really intended to do baffled him. This time an unruffled Sylvia Plath confronted an agitated Ted Hughes. When he demanded an explanation, she coldly took her note away from him, set fire to it in an ashtray, and ordered him to leave. She refused to say anything more than that she had to go out. He left.

On Sunday morning, Sylvia enjoyed an ample lunch with the Beckers, commenting that the soup, meat, salad, cheese, dessert, and wine were “wonderful” (or “marvelous”—Becker could not remember the exact words). Sylvia seemed “a little more cheerful, a little less tense,” and more focused on her children. She then announced that she wanted to return home that evening. Jillian wondered what had provoked this “suddenly purposeful” behavior. Was it her outing the previous night? Had it resolved something for her? In hindsight, Becker probed the moment: “Was it a decision to change her life—or … to die? Can a decision to die flush one through with a sense of excitement and urgency? Or was the bustle of commitment a deceptive performance, concealing a plunge into deepest despair? If so, it was an amazingly successful effort of will. She seemed invigorated, mildly elated, as I’d seldom seen her before.” As she watched Sylvia packing with deliberation, apparently in full command of herself, Jillian reminded her friend about taking her pills. “Yes, I’ll remember,” Sylvia assured her.

Becker felt relieved: “The truth was she had tired me. Her need for my attention had begun to seem relentless.” Jillian would have gone on taking care of Sylvia, but “she wanted to go, and nothing I could have done or said would have kept her against her will. And then there was Dr. Horder’s injunction: ‘She must look after the children, feel she’s necessary for them.’” Jillian’s husband, Gerry, drove Sylvia home. On the way she began to cry, and Gerry, an empathetic man who liked Sylvia, importuned her several times to return to the Beckers’ home. But she refused, and he left her around 7:00 p.m., after she had fed the children and put them to bed. Then Dr. Horder called to make sure she was all right.

Near midnight, Sylvia rang Trevor Thomas’s bell and asked him for stamps. She wanted to airmail some letters and get them in the post before morning. As he gave her the stamps, she asked him when he left for work in the morning. He asked why she wanted to know. Just wondering, she replied. Not long after closing his door, he noticed the hall light was still on. And when he opened the door, there was Sylvia. She had not moved. He told her he would call Dr. Horder. She did not want Dr. Horder, she answered. She was just having “the most wonderful dream.”

It is likely that the Sylvia seen last by Trevor Thomas was on an antidepressant. The euphoric sense of wholeness that is common in drug-induced states wore off perhaps around 5 a.m., when Thomas could hear Sylvia still pacing above as he fell asleep. That wonderful but evanescent moment of transcendence, akin to what she experienced when writing poems, seeped out of her. Knowing that a nurse was coming in the morning, it is just possible Plath expected to be saved. Was she seeking a temporary state of oblivion to assuage her agonies? A near death to be followed by yet another rebirth? No one can say. Perhaps Alvarez is right in suggesting suicide, like divorce, is a confession of failure, an admission, in Sylvia’s case, that “all one’s energy, appetite and ambition have been aborted.”

Mothers all over England tended to favor gas as a way to end their lives. They often took their children—extensions of their identities—with them, perhaps as vengeance against husbands and lovers, or because they had turned against a world that would treat their offspring cruelly. Sylvia seems to have considered this option in “Edge,” which describes a mother folding her children back into her body, just like petals “of a rose close.…” But always, she had returned to suicide as a singular act and death as a kind of deliverance.

Sylvia understood losing consciousness as a kind of death. The sensation fascinated her, as she recounts in a journal entry written after a tooth extraction. As the gas enters her, she feels her mouth crack into a smile: “So that’s how it was … so simple, and no one had told me.” Death itself she imagined as everything fading to black, like a fainting spell, but with “no light, no waking.” “I know a little how it must be,” she wrote prophetically more than a decade earlier, to “feel the waters close above you … To have your mind broken, and the contents evaporated, gone.”

It was now 11 February, and Sylvia Plath prepared to die. She left food and drink for her children in their room and opened a window. In the hallway, she attached a note with Dr. Horder’s name and number to the baby carriage. She sealed the kitchen as best she could with tape, towels, and cloths. She turned on the gas and thrust her head as far as she could into the oven. A hired nurse, arriving around 9:30 a.m. to begin her day heard the children crying at the window and called on a workman to break into the flat. They found Sylvia Plath lying on the kitchen floor with her head in the oven. It was far too late to revive her.

It may seem perverse—or at the very least paradoxical—to say that by her suicide Sylvia Plath finally found a way to recover herself. By all accounts, including her own, she had been writing the poetry that would make her reputation, but she knew that no human being could sustain such a peak of perfection and perform all the normal functions of existence in the “kitchen of life,” as Martha Gellhorn used to call day to day existence. When Sylvia Plath put an end to herself, she had reached one of those crisis points, exhilarated and exhausted by all she had accomplished—and by all she had left undone. This state of beatitude, this descent into the lower depths, is Shakespearean in its sublimity and tragedy and seems worthy of what Menenius says of Coriolanus, who had a nature “too noble for this world.”