Sylvia Plath at Home
Books & Babies & Beef stews
‘On Dec. 7th a new life will begin,’ Sylvia Plath confidently wrote in a letter home to her mother in Massachusetts. December 7th 1956 was when Cambridge University’s Michaelmas term ended, and the date that Plath, who until then had been in student halls, officially moved into her first married accommodation. ‘Home’ for the next six months would be a rented flat at 55 Eltisley Avenue, a Victorian terrace near Newnham College where she was in her final year of an English Literature degree.
They had married in London six months previously, but had kept their marriage a secret from everyone but their immediate families and a few trusted friends. Following advice from Sylvia’s mother Aurelia, they had both agreed to tell no one about their marriage until Plath had taken her final Tripos exams in May 1957.
But living apart from Ted was making Sylvia unable to focus on her studies. To have the chance of an academic post back in America she needed to do well in the final year of her Cambridge degree, so she decided to risk losing her Fulbright Scholarship rather than have the constant strain of keeping up a pretence. In the end, owning up wasn’t as difficult as Plath had anticipated: in early November 1956 her married status was accepted by both Newnham and the Fulbright officials in London, and she was able to continue with her studies.
At home at 55 Eltisley Avenue
Ted Hughes found the flat soon afterwards, and they both set about cleaning and decorating the dingy flat. Now that she was one half of a married couple, about to settle into her first ‘proper’ home, Plath felt full of a renewed confidence and energy. She and Hughes bought a blue secondhand sofa and yellow lampshades to brighten up the place, painted the walls ‘a lovely blue-gray’ and built five sturdy bookcases. While Ted began his job as a schoolteacher, Sylvia embarked on ‘a frenzy of scouring’.
She even took charge of her mother, instructing her on how best to break the news to their American friends.
‘Item: Do write “married recently” in our marriage announcement and say after December 7 “the couple will be at home at 55 Eltisley Avenue, Cambridge, England.” I’d rather not even have a politic untruth in print about the date.’
The term ‘domestic goddess’ might not have been prevalent in 1956, but there are shades of it in Plath’s touching determination to make their cheap rented flat a haven and a showcase: it would look like ‘like an ad out of House and Garden’, she told her mother and be kept ‘extravagantly warm’ day and night. Best of all, she would impress Ted and their friends by preparing delicious meals based on her beloved copy of Irma S. Rombauer’s bestselling Joy of Cooking.1 In her journals, Plath calls the author ‘my blessed Rombauer,’ and reads the book ‘like a rare novel,’ full of ‘delectable recipes… with all the right touches of seasoning.’
But the reality turned out to be disappointing, to say the least. Their ground-floor flat had no central heating, or hot water, and they had to share a bathroom with another couple who lived upstairs. Worst of all, the kitchen was ‘a little damp cell smelling suspiciously of mushrooms’, as Plath told her brother Warren on 20th December. It was not a place in which she wanted to linger, let alone create the ‘cakes, feathery pies, broiled chicken, parfaits etc etc’ she dreamed of. Much as she longed (at times) to study her beloved cookbook rather than the intricacies of Locke, cooking was a pleasure that would have to be deferred until they moved to Massachusetts the following summer.
Land of the Cookiesheet
Home, and the joy of cooking, still meant the east coast of the United States for the homesick Sylvia Plath. ‘Oh God Bless America, land of the Cookiesheet, Central Heating & Frozen Orange Juice!’, she wrote to her former Smith College room-mate, Marcia Brown Stern. Baking cakes as a student had been purely for fun and a pleasing contrast to the demands of her academic work: she ‘cooled lemon custard and crust on cold bathroom windowsill’ of her rental apartment at Smith, and dreamed of the spacious modern kitchen she would take possession of one day.
The cramped, dark kitchen at the back of 55 Eltisley Avenue did not fulfil her dream, though later Plath would reminisce about the ‘Kitchen Of Doors’ in Cambridge, which overlooked a small back garden with an old apple tree. But this was the late 1950s and being a wife automatically meant that the time-consuming daily necessities of cooking, shopping and housework fell on her shoulders, and prevented her from doing the work she wanted and needed to do: writing.
At every stage of her life, ever since she was a very young child, Plath was driven by the urge to publish and earn money from her poetry and fiction. This did not change when she married, but now she was also acting as her husband’s editor, publicist and literary agent and she was very good at it. When in February 1957 Ted Hughes won the American Poetry Center’s prestigious first book prize (a competition she had urged him to enter) and then a publishing contract with Faber and Faber for The Hawk in the Rain (1957), she was thrilled for him (‘I’m more happy than if it was my book published!’ she told her mother, chirpily). But soon afterwards the reality of her own situation struck her, and in early March 1957 she was struck down by debilitating writer’s block that threatened to undo all her carefully constructed plans.
A ‘triple-threat woman’
As Heather Clark writes in her biography Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (UK paperback 2021), by this stage Plath had published much more poetry than Hughes had, and ‘may have been surprised to find herself the trailing spouse’ (487). Ted’s success meant that Sylvia’s confidence in a bright future that combined ‘Books & Babies & Beef stews’, as she described it, began to waver. Plath began to realize that, as a wife, she was expected to shoulder most of the domestic burden, and the truth was that she had ‘3 jobs - writing, cooking & housekeeping’.
In her journal she warned herself that if she didn’t make time for her own work as a writer, she would simply ‘escape into domesticity & stifle yourself by falling headfirst into a bowl of cookie batter’ (Journal, 269). In a letter written to Marcia B. Stern dated 9 April 1957, she wrote ‘If I want to keep on being a triple-threat woman: writer, wife and teacher… I can’t be a drudge’.
(Below is my post featuring Sylvia Plath’s Triple-Face Portrait, 1950)
