Eighteen-year-old Sylvia Plath had written her mother Aurelia about exhaustion, sleeplessness and thoughts of suicide during her first semester at Smith College. On Sunday 10 December 1950 she wrote her mother about a fellow freshman who was suicidal over the college's academic demands. Reading between the lines, Aurelia wrote, in Gregg shorthand, on that letter's envelope:
Go to Dr. Booth Sylvia should go with her. If she wants they can should see Dr. Booth Tuesday. Girl will then be brought analyzed in one another presence.
Aurelia, clearly rattled, seemed to misunderstand psychiatric treatment, yet wasn't ignorant or cold regarding Sylvia's depressions and was sharply aware that Sylvia needed something like analysis. Sylvia's previous letter (7 December 1950) had signaled Aurelia with triggering words:
. . . hoping that I can make it to Xmas vacation without going completely insane -- you know that sort of morbid depression I sink into. . .
Whether the girls met with Dr. Booth, the college's psychiatrist, I don't know, but not 24 hours after writing the December 10 letter Sylvia wrote Aurelia that her friend seemed much better.
Getting all "A" grades was a distinction Sylvia wanted whatever its price. As a scholarship student, she only worked harder. Aurelia later told psychiatrists and journalists that overwork -- and not sexual matters -- had driven Sylvia to a breakdown. Academics were a double-digit percentage of Sylvia's trouble in summer 1953. In Sylvia's journal, October 1951, her sophomore year, Sylvia had written:
But worst of all I have this terrible responsibility of being an A-student. . . and I don't see how I can keep up my front. [1]
The tripwire for Sylvia's suicide attempt was academic: being denied admission to Frank O'Connor's writing course at Harvard. Sylvia tried killing herself in late August, the timing suggesting she dreaded returning to Smith for an extra-demanding senior year requiring an honors thesis about a novel, Finnegan's Wake, she hadn't yet read, and comprehensive English-lit exams she wasn't prepared for. [2] Which was her own fault. Esther Greenwood says:
I'd skipped [a course in eighteenth-century literature]. . . . They let you do that in honors, you were much freer. I'd been so free I'd spent most of my time on Dylan Thomas. (TBJ, 139)
She might even fail those exams. Or score less than brilliantly and not get a summa cum laude to go with her Phi Beta Kappa and college writing prizes, and so on.
Sylvia spent the fall '53 semester in mental hospitals and had electroshock treatments until in December she suddenly felt much better. In 1959 she pondered:
Why, after the 'amazingly short' three or so shock treatments did I rocket uphill? [3]
Sylvia wrote that the few treatments felt like sufficient "punishment." She doesn't say that if she claimed to be healed she could return to college for a gently scheduled extra semester to correct her path toward a triumphant senior year.
[1] Journal Fragment 17-19 October 1951, Journals.
[2] In the 1950s through the '60s, James Joyce was every English department's darling. Joyce scholars were the giants of the discipline (and acted the part). Sylvia wanted to be counted among them. Realizing she might not succeed, she chose another topic.
[3] "Therapy Notes," 3 January 1959, Journals.