‘On Dec. 7th a new life will begin,’ Sylvia Plath confidently wrote in a letter home to her mother in Massachusetts in 1956. December 7th 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 ground floor rented flat at 55 Eltisley Avenue, a Victorian terrace near Newnham College where she was in her final year of an English Literature degree. She and Ted Hughes had found the flat in early November and had been cleaning and decorating it for the past few weeks.
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 (I wrote about this in The Wedding Photos Part 1 & 2). 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 unhappy and 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.
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 dingy flat, built five sturdy bookcases together and painted the walls ‘a lovely blue-gray’. 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.” Sylvia told Aurelia matter-of-factly. ‘I’d rather not even have a politic untruth in print about the date.’
The term ‘domestic goddess’ might not have been prevalent in England 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
But the reality turned out to be disappointing, to say the least. Their flat had no central heating or hot water and they had to share a bathroom with another couple. 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 to make an American apple pie rather than study the intricacies of Locke and her other set texts, cooking was a pleasure that would have to be deferred until they moved to Massachusetts the following summer.
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 fulfill 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). 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.
As Heather Clark writes in her definitive recent 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 her confidence in a happy future that combined ‘Books & Babies & Beef stews’ suddenly wavered, as she realized that his success meant she would be expected to shoulder even more of the domestic burden. She began to resent having ‘3 jobs - writing, cooking & housekeeping’, and in her journal warned herself that if she wasn’t single-minded enough about 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’.
Baking sweet treats would always provide Plath with comfort, but the simple joy of cooking would have to be put on hold until some unspecified, more productive future. In the spring of 1957 Plath’s old college friend Sue Weller visited her and Ted at Eltisley Avenue, and she recalled ‘Sylvia weeping copiously over her stove as she cooked’, with Ted doing nothing to console her. Sue wondered if he had decided he could no longer deal with Plath’s ‘emotional problems’. Ted Hughes ‘would not be her Leonard Woolf’, writes Clark (488); this was certainly true. Sylvia Plath achieved so much in her short, blazing life, had many friends and and lived in beautiful homes, but it’s difficult not to think about the fact that she chose to end her life in another cold, lonely kitchen in London in 1963.
Postscript: In November 2020 I reviewed Heather Clark’s biography in ‘Let her be Ariadne: the brilliant resilient Sylvia Plath behind the myth’ for the Times Literary Supplement, which you can read here (£). Looking up the index of Red Comet again for this post in 2023, I noticed something I hadn’t spotted before. There is an entry for ‘domestic chores’ under Ted Hughes’s name, because in the early 1960s he regularly looked after their young daughter for a few hours in the morning while she wrote; in the afternoons she took over the childcare. Plath’s London friend Suzanne Macedo was astonished by Hughes’s ‘readiness to help with cooking and other household chores’. Then I searched in the index for ‘domestic chores’ under Plath’s name, but there’s nothing there, as if somehow they magically didn’t exist or matter to her. I am very grateful to Emily Van Duyne for showing me the transcript of a fourteen-page letter in which Hughes complained bitterly about Plath needing four hours a day in which to write, and saying he had been generous in allowing her this time.
Emily Van Duyne’s Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation will be published by W.W. Norton in July 2024, and is available for pre-order here.
All references, unless otherwise indicated, are from The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol. 2: 1940-1956, Peter K. Steinberg and Karen Kukil, eds. (New York, HarperCollins, 2017). Further reading: Peter Steinberg’s 2007 blogpost about 55 Eltisley Avenue, ‘Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes house for sale’ (accessed 7.12.23); These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath, Gail Crowther and Peter K. Steinberg (Stroud, Fonthill Media, 2017). Emily Van Duyne, ‘Life begins at 30’ and other posts on her excellent Substack site.
In The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, Plath calls the author of Joy of Cooking “my blessed Rombauer,” and reads the book “like a rare novel,” full of “delectable recipes … with all the right touches of seasoning.” See ‘Cooking with Sylvia Plath’ Valerie Stivers, The Paris Review, 5 January 2018 (accessed 7.12.23)
"In the spring of 1957 Plath’s old college friend Sue Weller visited her and Ted at Eltisley Avenue, and she recalled ‘Sylvia weeping copiously over her stove as she cooked’, with Ted doing nothing to console her. She wondered if he had decided he could no longer deal with Plath’s ‘emotional problems’. Ted Hughes ‘would not be her Leonard Woolf’ (Clark, 488). "
That's hard to read. I had never thought to compare Virginia Woolf to Sylvia Plath, but it's heartbreaking to think how much Virginia accomplished with the support of Leonard, compared to Sylvia's tragic story with her narcissist of a husband. So much lost potential.
I’ve tried to find some sliver of ‘like’ for Ted Hughes over the years and find myself wholly unable. I also try to keep his work ‘separate from the man’, and not chastise myself when I sit and contemplate the beauty of one of his poems. But then there’s Sylvia, and my anger flares and sadness fills me--a too short life (genius) caught in the crosshairs of an abominable narcissist.