As if to show Sylvia that he was in love with her and not some conception of his own, Eddie described what he liked about her: her voice, her tan, the way she settled languorously into a booth, her trick of licking the air with her tongue as though savoring the ideas that spilled out of her delectable brain. He mentioned her sensuous face, though not specifically her most erotic attribute: the full lips that perhaps accounted for Dick’s observation that she had “negroid” features. Eddie promised to return her letters, but he did not do so. Perhaps he was still concerned about the figure he would cut in her prose.

In effect, Eddie diagnosed Sylvia as a Henry James narrator. She wanted to be near the action, while never fully committing herself to it. Just two weeks after Eddie’s pronouncement, Dick chimed in, reporting what his friends said about Sylvia: “You were an observer of life and not a participator, in some ways … you seemed interested in the crude, raw parts of life, in a sensuous fashion—and yet content to read, view, see, observe, and not enter in.”

Sylvia could divert her depression, writing gamely to Aurelia about adventures in an airplane with Myron, flipping over Northampton and tilting right side up in ecstasy, but she was not sleeping at night. On 15 December, she announced to her mother she was going to see a psychiatrist about “my science.” Whatever the outcome of that meeting, it did not result in a plan for long-term treatment, and Sylvia went away deluding herself that she had done enough to dispel her gloom.

On 28 December, while visiting Dick at Saranac, Sylvia broke her leg on the advanced ski slope. In Letters Home, Aurelia implies that Sylvia, eschewing professional instruction, had recklessly hurtled downhill. Sylvia’s telegram announced a “fabulous fractured fibula,” as though she had accomplished some sort of Hemingwayesque feat. To Myron, she described herself in typically Baroque fashion gaily plummeting straight down without having learned how to steer, and then encountering a moment similar to their plane ride: “a sudden brief eternity of actually leaving the ground, cartwheeling … and plowing face first into a drift. I got up, grinned, and started to walk away. No good. Bang.” She signed the telegram to Aurelia, “Your fractious, fugacious, frangible Sivvy.” It was a light-hearted way of saying she had snapped. In times of stress, she would run herself off the road, so to speak—as she would actually do later while driving after Ted Hughes had left her. Sylvia sought to assure her mother, though, that the accident had actually been salutary, shocking her into a realization that she had been foolish to succumb to self-made “mental obstacles.” The accident, in other words, had broken through a self-demeaning pattern of behavior.

Sylvia wasn’t joking, however, when she wrote Eddie, dropping her bravado and conceding the merits of his analysis. And she was not as sanguine as she appeared to Aurelia. Indeed, Eddie was so disturbed by what she wrote he advised her to see a psychiatrist. He noted a recurring pattern: the appearance of a “handsome stranger” with whom she established an “immediate and miraculous rapport,” only to have him fade from her purview. Eddie did not want to say what this scenario meant, although it must have been tempting to do so, since in one instance the stranger had been a scholar familiar with Otto’s Plath’s work who seemed a sort of father-substitute, as well as a prospective lover. Perhaps reality was breaking through her illusions, Eddie speculated, showing her that prolonging the relationship with Dick only brought out her vicious, competitive side. But that “reality” could be as debilitating and even more dangerous than her illusions, which is why he urged her to get professional help.

In her journal, Sylvia rejected Eddie’s advice, saying that all she needed was more sleep, “a constructive attitude, and a little good luck.” She was determined to be more outgoing and get to know her fellow Smith students and the faculty better. In her junior year, Sylvia moved house from Haven to Lawrence, a dorm for scholarship students. Even casual friends say she seemed to take an interest in them. “Attitude is everything,” she announced in her journal, sounding like a self-help pop psychologist—and also the mythologist of herself, declaring that her winter solstice was over, and the “dying god of life and fertility is reborn.”

Nancy Hunter Steiner, who became Sylvia’s roommate, explains in a memoir why Lawrence House was a more congenial milieu for Sylvia. As scholarship students, she notes, “we brought to even the most trivial activity an almost savage industriousness—a clenched-teeth determination to succeed that emanated from us like cheap perfume.” No one expected Sylvia to stay up at night playing bridge. Lawrence House students did not make marriage to a wealthy man their first priority, recalls Ellen Ouelette. Judy Denison, a physics major inspired by the work of Marie Curie, vowed to emulate the Nobel Prize winner by marrying a physicist—who, unfortunately, later told her she should be happy ironing his shirts. “If you wanted to make me happy, you’d buy shirts that did not need ironing,” Judy retorted. The marriage ended in divorce.

Ellen Ouelette remembered how different Lawrence House was from other dorms. At Christmas, the Lawrence House students were in the habit of writing poems to one another so that they did not have to buy presents, something not all of them could afford. They would each draw a name out of a hat and then write a poem to the person selected. Eileen drew Sylvia’s name and was petrified. Eileen had received a D in freshman English, and she was well aware of Sylvia’s status as a star on campus. What to do? She went to Sylvia’s roommate, Nancy Hunter, and explained her dilemma. She learned from Nancy that Sylvia liked Modigliani’s paintings. So Eileen wrote a poem that began, “To Sylvia Plath with her Modigliani eyes, / My Christmas gift will be a surprise.” Sylvia made no comment on the poem but received it graciously.

Sylvia could sometimes appear nervous and high strung, but in the main she exuded considerable confidence. She had resolved her feelings about Dick, realizing her ambivalent attitude toward him had its origins in childhood. Even then, she said, she had been competing with him, panting after him on her bicycle. He was her childhood pacesetter. He was a projection of her “naive idealism”—and she had to admit, she did not want to kiss a man she feared was full of germs.

Meanwhile, Myron (Sylvia called him her Hercules) had no trouble carrying her around, leg cast and all. And as if on cue—Eddie would surely have smiled—another myrmidon arrived: Gordon Lameyer, an Amherst College senior, with whom Sylvia struck up an “instant rapport.” He was a James Joyce devotee, and Sylvia had chosen Joyce as the subject of her senior thesis. Gordon looked “most promising,” she wrote to her mother on 5 February, as though sizing up another candidate for her praetorian guard. She spoke of “the new Gordon,” making him sound like the latest model car. He was also “utterly lush.” She loved talking religion with this self-described “renegade Unitarian.” They had similar mothers. Indeed, Gordon’s mother, a Wellesley resident, had told him about Sylvia, who had addressed the local Smith club. Mrs. Lameyer encouraged his desire to date this brilliant student, now first in her class and a winner of several college literary awards. Gordon also offered Sylvia something new. He was in the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps and already had the manner, as Edward Butscher puts it, of an “officer and a gentleman in the grand old tradition.” Myron, with his “bad skin” and “barbarian parents,” now seemed second string, Sylvia declared in her journal.

Sylvia was ducking dates with Dick. She had not dumped him yet. “In the Mountains,” published in the Smith Review (1954), suggests why. When Isobel feels Austin’s “warm and possessive” arm across her shoulders, she experiences the “old hurting fear, just remembering the way it had been.” As in “Sunday at the Mintons,” the male is extravagantly confident of his prerogatives. Like Dick, Austin is in a sanitarium and is uncharacteristically reading a novel (it is obviously A Farewell to Arms), “worrying about the imaginary man and the dying girl” because their story reminds him of himself and Isobel. Earlier in their relationship, Austin had lectured Isobel about “how silly she was to feel sorry for people in books.” He now wants to prove he has changed, as he openly declares his need for her. But to Isobel this change in him is a sign of weakness, and though she cannot bring herself to tell him she does not love him, she implies as much: “It is different now.”