The Suez crisis and Britain’s ill-fated invasion of Egypt after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal brought out Plath’s innate disgust with militarism and materialism. Even more importantly, her reaction reflects a sensibility that rejected narrow nationalism. She viewed politics as she did poetry, in cosmic terms. That Britain was in league with France and Israel only demonstrated to her that the world was out of joint. She cared nothing for the British Empire, for face-saving measures, for the niceties and duplicities of diplomatic negotiations. She did praise Hugh Gaitskill, leader of the Labour Party, for eloquently opposing the invasion, but she really had no interest in political parties as such. She was the same person who had written to Hans about world peace. It made her feel no better that her country held nuclear superiority. Other British policies on Cyprus and the emerging African states were no better, and she hoped America would put pressure on her ally to withdraw from Suez. She now regarded her own land as the proper place for her and Ted. Britain was dead. In a rare chauvinist moment, she declared to her mother on 1 November, “God Bless America!” Six days later she wrote again to say she was sickened at the news of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary. She continued to reiterate her opposition to all war, saying she hoped Warren would become a conscientious objector.

Sooty old England had become a drag, and Sylvia primed Ted with pictures of a sumptuous summer on Cape Cod. She had also set him up for a poetry contest sponsored by Harper’s and adjudicated by Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, and Marianne Moore. Winning the prize and publication of his first book would be the making of Ted Hughes in America and Britain. He wrote his friend Lucas Myers on 16 November about the contest, expressing “small hopes” for his success, although he was obviously a writer who thought of himself as in the running. He and Sylvia tried to work out their future on a Ouija board, with mixed results. Strenuous efforts on their part put them in contact with a spirit, who rightly predicted which magazines would accept their work. But relying on the Ouija board to predict the winners of football pools did not yield the fortune they anticipated.

Sometime in late November, Sylvia Plath had her first encounter with Olwyn Hughes, who visited her shortly before Sylvia relinquished her Cambridge room for the flat she would share with Ted. Olwyn was then twenty-eight, tall and strikingly “handsome,” to borrow Elaine Feinstein’s word. Olwyn had served in various secretarial positions in Paris and may have struck her sister-in-law as the very type of career woman Sylvia abjured. The confident Olwyn, single and with a hearty laugh, seemed utterly self-contained and without a permanent male companion. Olwyn found Sylvia to be somewhat reserved. But, according to Anne Stevenson, nothing much happened in this first meeting that would have given either woman pause.

On 15 December, Sylvia wrote to Marcia Brown to tell her all about the magnificent Ted, a “roaring hulking Yorkshireman.” As usual, she described him as “looming” and ferocious. This time, though, she also associated Ted with the “sound of hurricanes,” a neat way to absorb him into her earliest memories of a mythological life by the sea. She positively reveled in reporting that she could not boss him around, declaring he’d bash her head in if she tried. Even when she discussed his teaching, she said he terrified his pupils into admiration. She described Ted as “staunchly British,” but she hoped he might consider settling in America, since Britain was a country that had no future.

Sylvia now believed she had overcome her demons. When Aurelia wrote at the end of the year about a young man in a suicidal state, Sylvia replied on 29 December with a heartfelt description of her own six-month ordeal, when she could not bear to read or write and detested the optimism of her doctors. Sylvia wanted her mother to tell him about Sylvia’s case and what Aurelia had said to her at the time: that it was most important to open yourself to life, to be easy on yourself, to get out in nature, and to see that you are valued for yourself, not for your achievements. Tell him, she urged Aurelia, that Sylvia had thought her case was hopeless, but she had nonetheless recovered. But, she warned, do not minimize what he feels; agree with him even if he thinks his plight is dire, she reiterated. She wanted her mother to give him as much time as she could afford. “Adopt him for my sake (as the Cantors did me)” and make no demands, Sylvia instructed.

In end-of-the-year letters to Aurelia and Warren, Ted mentioned that he was encouraging Sylvia to get started on that novel she kept announcing. She was pouring a good deal of energy into her cooking, he noted. The film Sylvia suggests meal preparation and baking were the diversions of a blocked writer. And it is true that over the next year Sylvia would produce relatively little prose or verse. But her energies had to go somewhere, and it is hard to see how forcing the novel at this point would have done her much good. She needed more time to work out a major project than was available while studying for her courses; her interrupted writing routine induced considerable anxiety and even depression.

Sylvia began 1957 by adhering to her two-hour-a-day writing regimen, beginning at 6:00 a.m., before Ted went off to teach at a nearby secondary school. At his urging, she memorized a poem a day while working on love stories for women’s magazines. She also typed some of Ted’s work and assembled poems she planned to submit to the Yale Younger Poets series. For the first time, in a letter to Aurelia on 9 January, Sylvia mentioned “violent disagreements” with Ted, but she assured her mother that he was kind and loving and so good about bringing discipline to her work. Ted resisted the idea of teaching on a permanent basis, as some poets were now doing, securing sinecures that would, in his view, stifle creativity. Writing came first. He taught, temporarily, to earn an income. Sylvia sounded less sure about renouncing an academic career, confiding to her mother on 19 January that she would not argue with her husband about it, mainly because she had such confidence in his future.

On 21 January, Ted wrote to Aurelia and Warren to thank them for Christmas presents and to extol Sylvia’s poetry—especially the cumulative power of the poems in the book she was putting together. Evidently he really did terrify his pupils into submission, since he mentions beating their heads for their “insolence.” Terror tactics, even rages, got the attention of boys who actually had good hearts, Ted insisted, although he seemed less confident of his methods than Sylvia had suggested. He thought he lacked authority and behaved more like an older brother than the father figure they needed. Teaching these recalcitrant lads was a sobering experience, he admitted, evincing none of the all-conquering hero aspect Sylvia liked to tout.

Teaching at Smith for a year was no sure thing, but Mary Ellen Chase’s visit to Cambridge buoyed Plath, who had thought that without a PhD she would get nowhere, judging by the first responses to the inquiries she sent to colleges. But Chase said Plath’s publications more than made up for the lack of a PhD. Sylvia worried, however, about Ted, then not well known in the United States. He would probably have to settle for teaching in a private preparatory school, Chase suggested. Hughes had not changed his mind about teaching, but the idea of voyaging to America and earning a tidy sum to support them through a year of full-time writing seemed desirable. And they both wanted to get away from “stuffy” and “cliquey” England, as Sylvia put it in a letter to Aurelia on 3 February.

Less than three weeks later, on 23 February, Ted received a telegram at 10:30 a.m. telling him he had won the New York City Poetry Center/Harper’s prize for his first book, The Hawk in the Rain. Now his hopes for a proper reception in America soared. They put in a long-distance call to Aurelia, forgetting it was not yet 6:00 a.m. in Wellesley, and in a follow-up letter the next day Sylvia gloated, dismissing the “frightened poetry editors” who had been rejecting his work. The major poet-judges recognized Ted’s talent. “Genius will out.” She was sure his book would be a bestseller.