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

typing one of Ann’s longer English papers for her. Ann’s foundering self-confidence was a drain on Sylvia’s as well. If her closest friend couldn’t cope, how well could she?
    Separated from Ann, Sylvia spent time with Sydney Webber, a history major who also took English courses, and Enid Epstein, an art major who had also published in Seventeen . Epstein’s work and Sylvia’s had been placed on the College Hall bulletin board when school had opened, which was where Enid and Sylvia met. The next few years, they worked together on Press Board, the college’s public relations division; for time spent writing press releases, women received salaries. Enid eventually became president of the Board and was, therefore, Sylvia’s boss. Sylvia, always outwardly affable, usually chose to be close friends only with people who shared her academic strengths and ambitions.
    She broke that pattern, though, when her search for a sophomore-year roommate led her to exuberant Marcia Brown, a sociology major. Marcia had many friends and often went out with the other women in Haven; by contrast, Sylvia studied unless she had a date who would pay the costs of going somewhere. Marcia provided Sylvia with a bridge to other housemates. Sylvia also had fun with Marcia. They talked nonstop, giggled, accepted each other’s personalities and loved them. One of Marcia’s gifts was to bring out Sylvia’s strengths, and Marcia said in turn that she never talked so well as with Sylvia. Even as a listener, her Wellesley friend was intense and compelling.
    Sylvia’s most exciting experiences during her first years at Smith — traveling and working on the Cape during the summer, visiting New York — occurred with Marcia and, often, because of Marcia. The short, brown-haired girl was Sylvia’s opposite in many ways besides appearance: she was direct and forthright, independent, and unconcerned about what people would say, or about what she should be doing.
    During her years at Smith, Sylvia and Ed Cohen continued their correspondence, which was valuable to Sylvia both emotionally and sexually. For example, one of Cohen’s 1950 letters describes different kinds of orgasms. For a virgin freshman girl, such explicit information was hard to come by. Sylvia also considered Cohen her “double,” her soul mate. He was a rebel; he was a would-be writer. Politics continued to be a refrain in their correspondence. Plath meditated on political themes in her journal, too. Much of this interest occurred when she was upset about her own life, as if she could legitimately show anger about international subjects when it was difficult for her to express anger about her more personal concerns — or too upsetting for her family. The political and personal came together most notably when Wilbury Crockett was called before the Wellesley town board to explain his political beliefs. (He was a pacifist.) Plath was deeply offended.
    In her journals and in letters to Cohen, Sylvia showed a nihilism that few other people saw.
    Life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter — they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship — but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.
    Part of her anger came from her sense of being limited, of having to choose between marriage and a career. She wanted both. She did not want to be a “meek” Christian wife. She wondered what Lillian Hellman, Willa Cather, and Virginia Woolf were like as women. Like them, Sylvia knew even at eighteen that her writing meant a great deal to her. She believed that the only immortality would exist through her writing (“I think I will be snuffed out. Black is sleep; black is