Although Sylvia told Marcia that neither she nor Ted could get any work done during the previous two months, in fact, as letters to Aurelia reveal, Sylvia was working on a new book of poetry that would find a publisher in February. She was also typing some of Ted’s work. As usual, Sylvia treated her mother to an anodyne version of events, emphasizing the coziness of the Hughes home and socializing with his family—especially with the beautiful Olwyn, blonde, as tall as Sylvia, and at thirty-one looking no more than twenty-one. Ted’s sister already loved her, Sylvia declared in her fairy-tale version of her stay with her in-laws. Sylvia’s first pregnancy, she assured her mother, was going well. Other than some backaches, heartburn, and a kicking baby, she felt surprisingly comfortable, perhaps because she gained relatively little weight. She estimated she walked three to five miles a day. She wondered if the birth of her child would coincide with the publication date (18 March) of Ted’s second book, Lupercal.

On 18 February, Sylvia wrote optimistically about living in England to Lynne Lawner, a friend acquired during a poetry contest several years earlier. Heinemann had accepted her first book of poetry for publication: “I think I shall be a very happy exile & have absolutely no desire to return to the land of milk & honey & spindryers.” A Somerset Maugham award for Ted (about $1,400) had them dreaming of a writing holiday the following winter somewhere in southern Europe. Sylvia was still cooking a full meal the day after her official due date of 27 March. A. Alvarez’s positive review of Lupercal in the Observer seemed to add to their anticipatory excitement on 31 March, when Sylvia predicted in a letter to her mother that the baby’s arrival could not be much more than a day away. Sylvia had swelled to 155 pounds, about twenty more than her usual weight.

Sylvia went out for an evening walk, watching a thin moon hover over the magical landscape of Primrose Hill, strewn with daffodils, and then retired for the night. She awakened just after midnight, when, as she wrote her mother, “everything began.” The first labor pains started at 1:15 a.m. The doctor arrived around 4 a.m., but without anesthetics, since no one had anticipated the rapid birth, which Sylvia called violent and painful, but also amazing. It was all over by 6:00 a.m., a remarkably easy first birth, nothing like Sylvia had anticipated. By the next day, she was sitting up in bed typing letters to her mother and Marcia Brown, detailing the epic event and describing Frieda Rebecca Hughes, “dozing and snorkeling” since dawn and already bathed by the midwife in Sylvia’s largest Pyrex baking dish. Ted had held her hand throughout the ordeal. She had avoided the horror of a hospital stay, a fear of Sylvia’s that Nancy Hunter Steiner has described in her memoir. Even though Sylvia had been advised to stay in bed, she got up to call her mother, announcing the birth of “Ein wunderkind, Mummy. Ein wunderkind!” Months later she would write a beautiful poem, “Morning Song,” that began with Frieda’s “bald cry,” announcing herself to the world, and ending with a tribute to a child already shaping a language for herself, “clear vowels” that “rise like balloons.”

Sylvia gave Ted full credit for all his support. For weeks he had been putting her to sleep in trances, predicting an “easy, short delivery.” At a time when squeamish men paced hospital corridors removed from the anguish and complications of childbirth, Ted Hughes was on the spot, relishing the moment when the baby crowned and began to emerge from Sylvia’s body. He told Lucas Myers all about it three weeks later in a long letter. Ted praised Sylvia’s active participation in the birth, unlike passive, immobilized mothers, “stupefied with drugs,” worked over by doctors in American hospitals. He likened her pushing the baby out of herself to “backing a lorry around a tight bend in a narrow alley full of parked cars.” Sylvia had absorbed Ted’s rejection of American know-how. A week after Frieda’s birth, Sylvia reprimanded her mother for taking a chauvinistic attitude: “No more about growth hormones and growth stopping, please! I’m surprised at you. Tampering with nature! What an American thing to feel measuring people to ideal heights will make them happier…”

On 21 April, a weeping Sylvia watched what became known as the Aldermaston marchers line up in a seven-mile-long column with “Ban the Bomb!” banners and signs, heading toward Trafalgar Square. She was proud that her baby should be part of this protest against the poisoning of the atmosphere with fallout from nuclear tests. Sylvia never wavered in thinking of the atomic bomb as civilization’s great misfortune. Politically and culturally, she felt much closer to England than to America, especially when she watched friends like the Merwins join the march. She hoped that neither Aurelia nor Warren was thinking of voting for the Machiavellian Richard Nixon. She wondered what they thought of Kennedy, expressing no opinion of her own about him.

“Frieda is my answer to the H-bomb,” Sylvia wrote Lynne Lawner. Plath was a very happy mother. She looked forward to having a large family. Wendy Campbell came from Cambridge to visit and saw a radiant Sylvia taking to motherhood with impressive assurance. Jane Truslow, a friend at Smith who had married Peter Davison, also visited the Chalcot Square flat, after which she expressed her astonishment that a prima donna like Sylvia had adapted to family life with such aplomb. Truslow told Edward Butscher that it was the first time she saw Sylvia able to get outside of herself. Peter Davison, always apt to see the negative side of his former lover, noted her intense restlessness. Dido Merwin, up to then a warm supporter of Sylvia, began to withdraw her affection, appalled at what she saw as a virago who hounded her long-suffering husband, who did everything possible to placate her. It seems true that Ted almost never complained to his friends about Sylvia and went out of his way to excuse her moody periods and rudeness. It troubled Sylvia that she did not have “a good American girlfriend,” and Ann Davidow’s visit in early May was more than welcome. They took up where they had left off ten years earlier. Plath felt an instant rapport with Ann’s husband, Leo Goodman, and noted that his astrological sign was Leo, just like Ted’s.

After a month at home, Sylvia relished a dinner party with T. S. Eliot, who had first recommended that Faber & Faber publish Ted’s work. Ted described Eliot to Olwyn as “whimsical” and yet “remote.” He kept staring at the floor, looking up only to smile at his wife, Valerie. But Sylvia enjoyed drinking sherry with the “wry and humorous” poet near a coal fire. He immediately put her at ease, even though she thought of herself as in the presence of a “descended god.” Valerie, just as welcoming, showed Sylvia her husband’s baby pictures: a handsome man right from the start, Sylvia wrote Aurelia. Then Stephen Spender and his wife arrived. Intimate gossip ensued about W. H. Auden, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf—virtually all of Sylvia’s favorites got the full treatment. Sylvia did not walk, she “floated” into dinner. Spender admired Ted’s “craggy Yorkshire handsomeness combined with a certain elongated refinement.” He remembered that Sylvia talked more than her husband and that he liked this pretty, intelligent woman, later writing her and apologizing for talking too much at dinner when Eliot’s conversation began to lag.

During this period, Sylvia met A. Alvarez for the first time. As poetry editor of The Observer, he had accepted both her work and Ted’s. He was, in biographer Elaine Feinstein’s words, a “kingmaker,” a critic who could establish reputations. He held a position of prominence on a major daily paper that no one else occupied—then or now. When he first visited their flat, Sylvia played the part of proper wife so well that he was embarrassed to learn that Mrs. Hughes was the Sylvia Plath he had published. She had to bring up the subject of her work when she realized he did not recognize her. But Alvarez detected no note of grievance or resentment in her behavior.