On 10 February 1956, Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother, Aurelia, from Cambridge, where she was – as most readers of this volume of her collected letters will know – a Fulbright scholar, having graduated from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, the year before. During the summer of 1953, she had suffered from “insomnia and exhaustion”, as the editors here describe it; electroshock therapy had been administered.
In August that year, she had attempted suicide, taking an overdose of sleeping pills and hiding in the basement of the family home in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Her disappearance was reported in newspapers under headlines such as “Brilliant college girl disappears” – for she had already made her mark not only as a student but as a published writer in Seventeen magazine and the Christian Science Monitor. But she recovered, and the scholarship that took her to England opened up a new world. She relished it.
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