Aurelia described Sylvia’s “great change” in Letters Home as a fundamental break in the daughter who had always expressed such joie de vivre. Sylvia’s journals suggest that her effort to maintain a brave front had collapsed. It was no longer enough to unburden herself by falling into Marcia’s arms and crying out her fears and anxieties. Writing to Eddie would not relieve enough of the pressure. A summer writing course with a renowned writer was not available to help her overcome dejection.

Sylvia saw one way out of her predicament: Attend Harvard Summer School and take a psychology course, which she considered both a practical and creative way of developing her talent. Also, she would meet new people and have access to the library and other activities in Cambridge, which would give her life structure. She dreaded staying home alone with the awful burden of constructing her own schedule. She admitted in her journal that she was frightened and called herself a “big baby.” Self-doubt sapped her creativity.

But the course would cost $250, not then a negligible sum for an undergraduate who calculated she had just enough to get by during her final year at Smith and had counted on making her mother’s summer easier by selling stories generated in O’Hara’s class. On balance, then, better to stay home, face her fears, learn shorthand from Aurelia as a practical skill (a woman at Smith’s vocational office had suggested as much), start reading Joyce for her senior thesis, and try to “forget my damn ego-centered self.”

In her journal entry for 6 July, Sylvia addressed herself as though she were a fairy-tale princess who had to be brought back to earth after the ball. Not to write at home would be a failure of nerve proving her unworthiness. She even held Dick up as a model. After all, he had been able to read and write while in the sanitarium. But how could she write when she equated living at home with returning to the womb, and when she had begun to think of suicide. She put it in these extreme terms: “Stop thinking of razors & self-wounds & going out and ending it all.” By 14 July, Sylvia was sleeping no more than two hours a night and having homicidal thoughts about Aurelia. Confessing that she could no longer imagine an existence outside of her “limited self,” she cried for God—or a god, some force outside herself that would lift her spirits.

Sylvia, as Eddie suspected, could not see that part of becoming an adult meant knowing when to ask for help. Sylvia told herself that her “negativism” was a kind of sickness, but like a Christian Scientist she thought she should heal herself, even though she was not able to place her faith in God. Thinking she could somehow control her emotions, she viewed her dilemma as an ethical or moral one, a matter of behaving according to a certain standard she thought appropriate for her age and competence. In spite of her interest in that Harvard psychology course, she did not see how compulsively repetitive her behavior had become, that her problem was her own psychology. She had escaped the crisis at the Belmont by finding refuge with the Cantors, and then had school to look forward to. This time she felt she could confront her demons at home with even less resilience in the aftermath of what she deemed O’Hara’s rejection of her.

Aurelia’s description in Letters Home of Sylvia’s affect suggests all the signs of clinical depression. Not even sunbathing seemed therapeutic. She would sit, book in hand, but could not read. Sylvia Plath could not read! All her talk was of how she had let people down. Even worse, she could not write. Aurelia noticed gashes on her daughter’s legs, and Sylvia responded, “I just wanted to see if I had the guts!” Horrified, Aurelia felt the hot touch of Sylvia’s hand and heard her scorching cry that the world “is so rotten! I want to die! Let’s die together!” Instead, Sylvia agreed to see a doctor and then a psychiatrist, although neither seemed to help much, other than prescribing sleeping pills and then submitting her to brutal electric shock treatments administered without sedatives or muscle relaxants.

On 24 August, a day when Sylvia seemed to be doing better, Aurelia went out with a friend, and then returned home to find a note saying her daughter had gone out for a long walk. Sylvia went missing for three days, until Warren heard what sounded like a moan coming from the basement. There he found Sylvia in a crawl space, half-conscious after throwing up some of the sleeping pills she had swallowed to end her life. She had a gash on her face that would leave a scar, but otherwise she seemed to recover rather quickly from her physical ordeal. In September, she began to recuperate under the supervision of Dr. Ruth Beuscher at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. Sylvia later described her therapist to Gordon Lameyer as “one of my best friends, only 9 years older than I, looking like Myrna Loy, tall, Bohemian, coruscatingly brilliant, and most marvelous.”

Sylvia’s disappearance and discovery were widely reported, and she became news in a way she never intended but which had a remarkable impact on her vocation as a writer. Eventually, she would realize that dying had become part of her true subject matter. The notion of living with thoughts of death would suffuse some of her best, most sincere material. She had meant to die and had felt more strongly about dying than about any other decision she would ever make. Suicide, a kind of ultimate commitment, repudiated deceit and her false facades. Whatever happened next would have to be measured against the authenticity of that act.

There was no easy way back from death, which has a sureness and finality to it that appealed to Plath. Recovery was a far less decisive process, fitful and fraught with confusion and doubts about her capacity to revive her creativity. Certainly she was in no shape to return to Smith. Literary critic Robert Gorham Davis, one of Sylvia’s favorite professors, wrote Aurelia offering his help, mentioning that his daughter knew Sylvia well. He and his wife, whom Sylvia also admired, were taken aback because Plath had seemed so gay during her last semester at Smith: “Though we have both had some experience with upsets of this sort in other people, we did not notice in the Spring any signs of stress of this kind, though this may have been imperceptive of us.” Indeed, Davis had once confided to his colleague, George Gibian, that unlike other neurotic creative writing students, Sylvia seemed entirely whole and healthy. He did add, though, that Sylvia had demanded “far too much of herself.”

Professor Elizabeth Drew, another Plath favorite, wrote directly to Sylvia.

I know exactly how you felt, because once in my life I had a similar depression, though for a different reason, & it seemed the logical & the only way out. But now that is all over & you must remember all the time how good life is & how much joy & adventure there will be in it for you. As to your work, you are by far the best student in English in the College & you don’t have to strain to be. You could do it standing on your head or in your sleep! I suspect you were pushing yourself much too hard in the spring … You just burnt yourself out for a spell. Now you’ve got to let life flow in all over you again & it will, never fear.

Such letters testified to the powerful impact Sylvia Plath had at Smith, signaling how dearly she was missed and what a warm welcome she would receive on her return.

Gordon Lameyer’s letter was perhaps just as important to Sylvia: “I admire you, Sylvia, I admire you more than any girl I know. More than anything I don’t want you to feel differently about me now. I want to be your dearest and closest friend as you have been ever since June to me. Believe me, please believe me, I can understand anything. Your happiness is everything to me, so please get well as soon as you can.” Lameyer would write her long letters while at sea during his service in the navy.