Sylvia Plath: A Biography by Linda Wagner-Martin Page B

entries during the fall of 1951, Sylvia drew on Mead’s book as she tried to sort through her situation with Dick. She understood that she would always argue with him unless she changed:
    I can whittle my square edges to fit in a round hole. God, I hope I’m never going to massacre myself that way.... The most saddening thing is to admit that I am not in love. I can only love (if that means self-denial — or does it mean self fulfillment? Or both?) by giving up my love of self and ambitions — why, why, why, can’t I combine ambition for myself and another?
    Characteristically, everything positive about her realizations seemed negative to Plath, and she continued to blame herself for the dilemma: “I am vain and proud. I will not submit to having my life fingered by my husband.... I must have a legitimate field of my own, apart from his, which he must respect.”
    For all the expert faculty at Smith College, Sylvia knew few women professors she could admire completely as role models. Many of her teachers were women who had given their lives to teaching and scholarship, most of them unmarried and, even if married, childless. Sylvia was looking for professors with families, women with what she regarded as rich, happy lives, full of accomplishment and pride in themselves. Even the successful Smith novelist Mary Ellen Chase was so modest, so deferential to the “great” writers about whom she taught, that she was embarrassed if students wrote essays on her fiction. Mentally and emotionally, Sylvia was trying out the roles of writer, wife, mother, professor.
    Luckily, she had a chance to work out her ideas and emotions in Evelyn Page’s creative writing course. Page was inspiring and shrewd, warm and practical (she limited her students to one story about suicide in each course); she understood adolescence, and she respected her students. For her course, Sylvia wrote three stories that later appeared in Mademoiselle and Seventeen , and other stories and poems as good. Before class met, Sylvia and Enid Epstein read and critiqued each other’s writing. Always enthusiastic about her friends’ work, Sylvia praised whatever Enid wrote — and then worried about her own writing. Enid in turn encouraged Sylvia, but Sylvia needed several cups of coffee and much praise before she was ready to submit her work.
    Sylvia’s creative writing and essays during her sophomore year were polished and sophisticated. When she took courses where she could work independently, her intellectual strengths became obvious. She was adept at selecting and correlating details and shaping material. Every professor who knew her work was impressed with her skill, her vivacity, and her hunger for learning. Robert Gorham Davis, a well-known American literature scholar who was then chair of the English Department, said about Sylvia’s presence in class, particularly her smile:
    It was not just a smile for the photographer. It was certainly not the ambitious, ingratiating, falsely-open smile of someone eager to please and be accepted.... It was a radiant smile (I thought) of happiness at what was being offered, being shared.... I was conscious of Sylvia from the beginning, before I knew the quality of her work, because she was always attentive, always looking up at me as I spoke, always smiling. I can still see her very clearly.
    Sylvia was once again submitting work to national magazines. Seventeen bought the story “The Perfect Set-Up” for $25 and “Initiation” for $200 (the prize in its annual fiction contest). Seventeen also bought five poems, “To a Dissembling Spring,” “The Suitcases Are Packed Again,” “Carnival Nocturne,” “Twelfth Night,” and “Cinderella.” “Crossing the Equinox” appeared in the Annual Anthology of College Poetry . The Christian Science Monitor took “As a Baby-Sitter Sees It,” her essay about the Swampscott summer, which ran in two issues and included her drawings of the Mayo children; the Monitor also