It seemed imperative now to have “a Job,” she confided to her journal. Searching the want ads, she considered the possibilities: painting parchment lampshades, filing, typing, or assisting a real estate agent. She actually spent a day with a realtor, fascinated by the woman’s manipulative methods, but concluding that serving as her Girl Friday was not likely to pay very well. Even waitressing remained an option, but then Sylvia saw an ad for a housekeeper/babysitting position with well-to-do Christian Scientists, the Cantors. In spite of her vow of “NEVER AGAIN” when it came to such jobs, Sylvia liked the sound of Mrs. Cantor’s voice over the phone and enjoyed her interview, she wrote Marcia Brown. This time Sylvia would be in charge of two small children, but would also have the company of the Cantor’s teenage daughter. Sylvia could not resist the comfortable surroundings of this charming family in Chatham, Massachusetts, near the sea—always a draw for her—and a two-hour drive southeast from Wellesley.

Sylvia was treated well, more like a member of the family than in her previous home care experience. She had long conversations with Mrs. Cantor about Christian Science, which Sylvia enjoyed so much that she attended Sunday school, where she was proud, she wrote Aurelia, of knowing “all the right answers.” A skeptical Sylvia thought she was too much of a materialist to accept a doctrine that proclaimed the material world was a kind of illusion, a human-created evil that could be overcome by fealty to God’s word. But she did not dismiss the faith out of hand because she did believe in the power of good thoughts, in mind over matter, to a certain extent. After all, it was part of her artist’s credo that she could reshape the world. Christian Science, moreover, draws on the Platonic nature of Christianity that posits an irrefutable realm of what Sylvia called “absolute fact.” Individuals by their very nature could not have access to this ultimate source of truth. Sylvia sounds like Saint Paul, echoing his remark on the fallibility of human knowledge when she alludes to the individual’s own “particular grotesque glass of distortion.” In a fascinating journal passage, she compares the individual’s sensibility to a sounding board picking up various intimations of immortality. Wordsworth, Berkeley—a host of thinkers and artists—seem to suffuse Sylvia’s synthesis of her own experience, leading to a remarkable statement about the “radio programs … all around us, clogging the air, needing only a certain sensitive mechanism to make them a reality, a fact.” Sylvia would later write for the radio—the wireless as it was called in Britain—realizing how powerfully this spoken medium could penetrate the psyche, provoking the listener to create a simulacrum of the world. She thought of Hamlet’s line, “Thinking makes it so.” She thought of what she had made of her father’s death. Where Christian Science faltered was in its inability to distinguish between truth and the individual’s “dream-world,” valid enough for that person, for Sylvia herself, but was it near to the truth that others imagined? She could not say. She could only observe that these Christian Scientists certainly treated their beliefs as real—just as real as her “dream-bubble of reality,” a phrase that wonderfully captures the evanescence of perception. What was unchanging fact? Could it be found in a laboratory? These questions recall Dick’s own certitudes, which Sylvia could not share. Sylvia seems more comfortable with Wordsworth’s notion that we half-perceive and half-create our world; she was not willing to take the knower out of what is known. Perhaps the best one could do is master what she called the “counter positions,” the dialectic between competing versions of truth.

What had especially pleased Sylvia about “Sunday at the Mintons” is that although she had started out simply modeling Elizabeth on herself, she ended by creating a world that was not merely derived from her own. That development seemed like a breakthrough, creating a work of art that transcended her own concerns—creating, in fact, a story that dramatized the very tensions between dream and reality that her journal passage probed.

On 2 August, Sylvia wrote to her mother about meeting Valerie Gendron, who wrote love stories for the pulps and ladies magazines. Sylvia wanted to spend the day talking to a writer who had been “through the mill.” A subsequent visit with Val resulted in Sylvia’s decision to follow her mentor’s advice: Write fifteen hundred words a day, no matter what. Think of it as singing scales and doing warm-up exercises, Val told her during a five-hour talkfest that Sylvia treasured as one of her best adventures as a writer. It was a wonderful workout that included Val’s critique of a Plath story, a gesture Sylvia regarded as exceptionally generous. Sylvia poured over this experience in her journal, describing in detail the bookmobile Val ran to help support herself in a sort of disheveled independence that to Sylvia seem scrumptious—as did the three hunks of cake she duly recorded eating. Suddenly Sylvia’s journal brimmed with drafts of the kind of romantic stories that women’s magazines preferred.

Pleasant dates with Dick may also have stimulated some of this boy-girl fiction. In the quiet, scheduled summer of 1952, Sylvia seems to have suspended her doubts about Dick. A day off from babysitting felt like the lid on her life was blown off. She needed the security of knowing that in a few weeks she would be back at Smith and immersed in the delirium of study. Mrs. Cantor treated her like Little Red Riding Hood when Dick called one night near 11 p.m. Where did Sylvia meet so many boys? Mrs. Canter wondered. Now the unregulated atmosphere of the Belmont, the midnight-to-dawn dances and beach parties Sylvia described to Enid Epstein, a Smith classmate, seemed preferable to the confining Cantors. The Belmont was like “college with the lid off.”

A second encounter with Eddie before Sylvia began her junior year at Smith caused trouble. He judged her cold letters afterward as an indication that she did not think she had measured up to his expectations. If so, Eddie insisted she was quite mistaken. He had come away all the more impressed with her, although, according to Paul Alexander, Eddie became disturbed at Sylvia’s tendency to pose, to pretend pleasure—like she did while listening to bad jazz in a Boston club. She was too studied, lacked spontaneity, and seemed “all mask.” In her journal, Sylvia would later liken herself to Nina Leeds, a character in Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, a play that experiments with the use of masks to dramatize the disparity between what people say and what they think as they withhold themselves from others.

On 23 September, Dick drove Sylvia, in a state of high tension, to Smith to begin the fall term. Now withdrawn and withholding, he upset her. Was she at fault? Did he sense, as she put it in her journal, that she was jealous of him? She turned to his more outgoing brother, Perry, always a favorite of hers, who reciprocated her warm confidence in him. He admitted he was anxious about Dick, who was “tough to take when he is ‘that way.’” Perry wondered if Dick’s emotional problems had to do with his conflicted views of his parents and the moral standards they set for him. Was Dick capable of love, Perry wondered, adding, “He certainly needs someone to believe in him.” But Sylvia should not blame herself: “Syl—you are wonderful. You always are helping me, giving, never taking, never asking. What would I do without you. Love, love, Perry.” He remained an openhearted admirer, and years later he assisted biographer Edward Butscher, who could not secure Dick Norton’s cooperation.

For all her reservations about Dick, Sylvia felt bereft because of his coolness, and she depended even more on her affectionate correspondence with her mother, who sent news in early October that a story, “Initiation,” had won a $100 prize from Seventeen, where it would be published in January 1953. “Initiation” deals with a high school girl’s ambivalent feelings about the hazing ritual of the sorority she is pledging, feelings that are reinforced when the sorority spurns her best friend for not wearing the right clothes and not conforming to the group’s sense of propriety. Sylvia herself had gone through her own “initiation,” telling her mother that she had been required to ask everyone on a bus what each had for breakfast. One playful passenger replied, “Heather birds’ eyebrows on toast,” explaining that these creatures lived on “mythological moors.” Put that in a story, Aurelia said. Letters Home contains a note explaining the circumstances of “Initiation”’s origin, yet another effort on Aurelia’s part to counteract the merciless portrait of her that would later appear in The Bell Jar. In this case, Olive Higgins Prouty seconded Aurelia’s suggestion. “Think of the material you have!” Prouty exhorted Plath. As Paul Alexander suggests, this was a pivotal moment in Sylvia’s vocation as a writer, training her focus on the world in front of her.