As so often, though, what Sylvia said on one page would be contradicted on another. Her shifting moods made it impossible for her to settle down. Thus a journal passage written after her return to Smith for a second year pays tribute to blind dates and the thirty-odd boys who had made her more conversant and confident. She was making her entrances downstairs in Haven House with a “practiced casualness,” no longer worrying whether her slip was showing or her hair uncurling. Now Sylvia could see herself as an attractive creation. It was show time at Smith College. What had bothered her so much about her babysitting stint in Swampscott was, as she put it in her journal, living in the “shadow of the lives of others.” The very expression of this sentiment in the passive voice suggests how much Sylvia missed the spotlight.

Resuming correspondence with Eddie Cohen was one sure sign that Sylvia had recovered from her summer in shadow. She had also come to realize how awful she had been to Eddie after his long ride to see her. She told him about Dick’s tentative courtship, which Eddie diagnosed as her suitor’s uncertainty about himself and Sylvia. Eddie did not need to read her journal to sum up her problem: the huge discrepancy between the way she was living and her ambitious plans, a discrepancy that marriage would complicate. But he did not know that Sylvia was also keeping score, estimating that a woman had only about eight years before the wrinkles began to show and she was no longer physically attractive.

Then Sylvia had one of those Jane Eyre/Thornfield Hall episodes. Everyone in Haven House was invited to Maureen Buckley’s coming-out party at her family’s mansion in Sharon, Connecticut. Maureen was the sister of William F. Buckley Jr., then a senior at Yale and later the founder of the National Review and one of the guiding lights of American conservatism. Bill had brought along his Yale class to meet all the Smith girls. Sylvia, sought after by several dance partners, gloried, perhaps for the first time, in her womanhood, feeling like a princess escorted by the scions of wealthy families, including Plato Skouras, son of Spyros Skouras, head of 20th Century Fox. One of her courtiers actually addressed her as “Milady.” Another said she looked like the Botticelli Madonna hanging over the Buckleys’ fireplace. That night, as she drifted off to sleep and into “exquisite dreams” in what might as well have been Thornfield Hall, she could hear the wind “wuthering outside the stone walls.”

This idyll—coming so soon after a summer of baby-minding and Sylvia’s provisional romance with Dick—she transformed into lines that placed her in the pastoral world of Renaissance poetry, picturing the sculpture of a bronze boy “kneedeep in centuries,” bedecked with leaves heralding the passage of time. From longing to frequent barrooms to frolicking on landed estates, Sylvia Plath could hardly contain herself. Returning to the Smith campus, however, she confessed to Aurelia that the course work frightened her, and she could not keep up. She saw her future as only work and more work.

Eddie was talking of coming east again, and this time Sylvia wanted to show him a better time, alerting her mother that she would like to invite him to their home. He remained a kind of reality check on Sylvia’s tendency to romanticize events. When she described Constantine, one of the Buckley party cavaliers who had invited her for a Princeton weekend, Eddie (sounding like Nelson Algren) observed: “He reminds me, in a vague way, of someone I know. I dunno some romantic type critter I run into now & again who discusses love & literature & atomic power with equal glibness & appears and disappears with the suddenness of Mephistopheles.” Sylvia quoted Eddie’s verdict to Aurelia, concluding succinctly, “Not bad for a thumbnail sketch!”

Sylvia, for all her worries, survived the fall semester of 1951 and, as usual, did well in her studies. In January 1952, she spent a weekend at Yale with Dick, who took her on his rounds as a medical student. She witnessed a birth, which she seemed to take in stride. She was not prepared, though, for the shocking revelation that Dick, who had led her to think otherwise, was not a virgin. She was angry about his deception and sudden confession. She was generally mad at men, who could play around in ways that women could not. Her reference to him now as a “blond god” was surely sarcastic. Sylvia was no prude, but Dick was different. She had built him up into a pristine idol. Now he seemed just like other men, some of whom she might have bedded if she had loved them or was not so worried about emotional involvements and pregnancy. She was still holding out for a taller, more romantic figure than Dick, so that she could wear heels and do the romantically impractical thing. Even at her most passionate, sooner or later Sylvia took the measure of her men. She yearned for the recklessness of romance, but she also read the newspapers and worried about world events, still pouring out her anxieties about nuclear war in letters she had resumed writing to Hans.

Only Eddie, though, saw what really troubled Sylvia about Dick. Did it ever occur to her, Eddie asked, that she was not so much a woman deceived as “an engineer whose latest airplane design didn’t quite come up to specifications in performance?” Eddie had no interest in defending Dick, but he thought the larger issue was Sylvia’s fear of what sex would do to her in a committed relationship. Her quest for a “Golden God” seemed a symptom of her desire to force some kind of resolution of her anxieties. He noticed that in her latest letter she had used the word “rape” at least five times. “Keerful, gal, your dynamics might be slipping,” he cautioned her. Had she noticed that every sinus attack, as well as other illnesses, had come just after a breakup or some other contretemps with a male? Eddie was no expert on psychosomatic sickness, but he was beginning to wonder.

Dick, on the other hand, continued to sound in his letters very much like Samuel Richardson’s unreal gentleman, Sir Charles Grandison. “I am aware of the joy, the honor of being near you and under your spell,” Dick wrote on 28 January 1952. That kind of banality could be briefly soothing, but his formulaic letters explain why Sylvia said she sought someone “more intuitive.” Dick wrote in phrases that could have been copied out of a conduct primer. Sylvia wanted the praise, of course, but it had to be delivered with panache. If Eddie had been able to confect a style that brought Sylvia both to the drawing room and the barroom, he might have succeeded in winning her.

Eddie Cohen never lost sight of Sylvia the writer. But Dick did, as he mused about the life of a doctor’s wife, making Sylvia doubt he had any idea of the space and time required to write. Her work was not a sideline, and she believed she would lose respect for herself if she simply became absorbed in her husband’s career—especially since Dick had become more assertive on their well-planned dates. Was this the result of a “mother complex”? Like Aurelia, Dick’s mother was a “sweet, subtle matriarch,” but she was also the manipulative mom that Sylvia had been reading about in Philip Wylie’s influential Generation of Vipers. Momism, Wylie argued, was emasculating men and pacifying women into a conformism that would become one of the dominant themes in books about the American family in the 1950s. Mrs. Norton handled the family’s finances and ruled the home, reducing her husband, at times, to a supplicant, the weak father that was also a feature of 1950s situation comedies. Perhaps Dick’s seduction of the Vassar girl he told Sylvia about was his own version of rebelling against Momism, Sylvia speculated. And would he now seek to impose a submissive pattern of behavior on Sylvia, so as to forestall her domination of him? A medical career might well represent the best way to fend off a demanding wife and mother. His not entirely successful bid to achieve supremacy over Sylvia perhaps accounted for their contradictory denial and acceptance of one another. In sum, she believed they were both scared of what they might do to one another—as she would later reveal in her story, “The Fifty-Ninth Bear.”