Career and marriage
Plath met poet Ted Hughes on February 25, 1956, at a party to launch a poetry journal, St. Botolph's Review. In a 1961 BBC interview now held by the British Library Sound Archive, Plath describes how she met Hughes:
I'd read some of Ted's poems in this magazine and I was very impressed and I wanted to meet him. I went to this little celebration and that's actually where we met... Then we saw a great deal of each other. Ted came back to Cambridge and suddenly we found ourselves getting married a few months later... We kept writing poems to each other. Then it just grew out of that, I guess, a feeling that we both were writing so much and having such a fine time doing it, we decided that this should keep on.
Plath described Hughes as "a singer, story-teller, lion and world-wanderer" with "a voice like the thunder of God".
The couple were married only four months after they met, on June 16, 1956, at St George the Martyr in Holborn, London, and in honor of Bloomsday, with Plath's mother as the sole witness. They spent their honeymoon in Paris and Benidorm, Spain. Plath returned to Newnham in October to begin her second year. During this time, they both became deeply interested in astrology and the supernatural, using ouija boards.
In June 1957, Plath and Hughes moved to the United States; beginning in September, Plath taught at Smith College, her alma mater. She found it difficult to both teach and have enough time and energy to write, and in the middle of 1958, the couple moved to Boston, where they lived at 9 Willow St. in Beacon Hill. Plath took a job as a receptionist in the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital and in the evenings attended a creative writing seminar given by poet Robert Lowell (also attended by the writers Anne Sexton and George Starbuck).
Both Lowell and Sexton encouraged Plath to write from her personal experience. She openly discussed her depression with Lowell and her suicide attempt with Sexton, who led her to write from a more female perspective. Plath began to consider herself as a more serious, focused writer. At this time, Plath and Hughes met the poet W.S. Merwin, who admired their work and was to remain a lifelong friend. Plath resumed psychoanalytic treatment in December, working with Ruth Beuscher.
In summer 1959, Plath and Hughes went on an eight-week camping trip across Canada, the United States and Mexico, after which they stayed at the Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, in fall. Plath stated that at Yaddo she learned "to be true to my own weirdnesses", but she remained anxious about writing confessionally, from deeply personal and private material.
The couple moved back to England in December 1959 and lived in London at 3 Chalcot Square, near the Primrose Hill area of Regent's Park, where an English Heritage plaque records Plath's residence from 1960-1961. Their daughter Frieda Rebecca was born on April 1, 1960, and in October, Plath published The Colossus, her first collection of poetry.
In February 1961, Plath's second pregnancy ended in miscarriage; several of her poems, including "Parliament Hill Fields", address this event. In August, she finished her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar; immediately afterwards, the family moved to Court Green in the small market town of North Tawton, Devon. Her son Nicholas Farrar was born on January 17, 1962. In mid-1962, Plath and Hughes began to keep bees, which would become the subject of many of her poems, including “Beekeeper’s Daughter,” “Arrival of the Bee Box,” “The Bee Meeting,” “Stings,” and “Swarm”.
Before moving away from London in August 1961, the couple sublet their flat at Chalcot Square to the Canadian poet David Wevill and his wife Assia (née Gutmann) Wevill. The couples became friends, and Plath and Hughes invited the Wevills to visit them at their new house in Devon in May 1962. Hughes was immediately struck with Assia, as she was with him. In July 1962, Plath discovered Hughes was having an affair with Wevill. In September, as a last attempt to save their relationship, Plath and Hughes traveled to Cleggan in Ireland to visit the poet Richard Murphy. The pair then embarked on a ten-day trip to Spain, where Plath and Hughes previously spent their honeymoon. In October, Plath and Hughes separated for good, and Hughes moved back to London, leaving Plath and their children behind in Devon.
In the final months of her life, beginning in October 1962, Plath experienced a great burst of creativity and composed most of the poems on which her reputation now rests, writing at least 26 of the poems of her second collection Ariel, which would be published posthumously (1965 in the UK, 1966 in the US). In December 1962, she returned alone to London with their children and rented, on a five-year lease, a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road—around the corner from her previous flat at Chalcot Square. William Butler Yeats once lived in the house, which bears an English Heritage blue plaque for the Irish poet. Plath was pleased by this fact and considered it a good omen.
The winter of 1962–1963 was one of the coldest on record in the UK; the pipes froze, the children—now two years old and nine months—were often sick, and the house had no telephone. Her depression returned, but she kept on writing poetry, which would be published after her death. Her only novel, The Bell Jar, was published in January 1963 under the pen name Victoria Lucas, to protect the identities of the real people the characters were based on and Plath herself in case of poor reception. The Bell Jar was met with critical indifference.
