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Aurelia for comfort just as Scarlett sought out Ellen’s embraces. But Scarlett O’Hara could never be as nice as her mother, and Sylvia realized early on the same would be true of her.
    Sometimes Sylvia relegated Aurelia to the role of an offstage mother like Stella Dallas. Aurelia would eventually watch her beloved daughter depart for England and a life just as separate and unreachable to her as Stella Dallas’s daughter’s life is to the protagonist of Olive Higgins Prouty’s novel. Stella can only stand in the street and gaze yearningly up at the window into her wealthy daughter’s grand new world. And yet, as Sylvia’s letters show, Aurelia—again like Stella Dallas—had a certain power. On the radio, Stella, like Superman, often got people out of jams. She was a tower of strength for her daughter. It is telling that when Sylvia married Ted Hughes, she wanted only her mother by her side.
    Throughout her secondary school years, Sylvia won awards for her writing and her art. Other than her mentor, high school teacher Wilbury Crockett, who ran his literature classes like college seminars, her teachers by and large did not see her as a genius, although Anna C. Craig, a guidance counselor at Wellesley High School, recalled for Edward Butscher that Sylvia “devoured” Shakespeare and was an avid reader and creative writer, a standout who was also a “loner.” One of Plath’s classmates, Louise Lind, told Butscher that she and Sylvia “laughed and giggled together over school projects.” Many years later, when Aurelia was still pondering the reasons for her daughter’s suicide, Wilbury Crockett told her:
    As I have said to you several times, those who had asked me about Sylvia seem to disbelieve my recollections. But she was in my presence always affirmative, filled with exuberance, in love with life—with an unquenchable relish for the human adventure. Amusingly she seemed quite out of breath with it all. I loved having her come to the house … much hilarity—and, of course, much serious conversation. As you must realize, I came to know her well after three years of having her in class. And I do look back upon our relationship with great fondness.
    If I were to single out a word to describe her, it would be radiant.
    Sylvia was perhaps too dutiful, too eager to please, to stand out in stereotypical fashion as an aloof, mercurial intellectual destined for greatness. She looked wholesome and, as she frequently said, tanned well. She liked to bike and play tennis, a game a neighbor boy, Phil McCurdy, taught her. Unlike other males, he did not seem especially daunted by a girl who scored 160 on an IQ test and could be formidable in conversation. By her junior year of high school, Sylvia was going out on dates and would not, for very long, be without the attentions of a boy like Perry Norton, who lived close by. There were many others throughout her years in school.
    Looks mattered to Sylvia. So did what she wore. So did matters like good manners and diction. She complained that a couple of girls at camp used words like “ain’t” and “youse” that hurt her ears. They were “ not well brought up.” A middle-class sense of propriety remained a very strong feature of this poet even when she lived among the loucher types of the literary world. Her acerbic comments about people were a form of scrubbing away the squalor that surrounded some writers and other denizens of arty conclaves. Her favorite radio heroes—the Lone Ranger, The Shadow, and Superman—were part of a sort of cleanup detail, making the world morally immaculate. Sylvia had a visceral dislike of messes—moral and otherwise—that accounts for her extreme reactions later in life to her husband’s appalling physical and moral hygiene.
    Aurelia, and later Ted Hughes, never felt comfortable with Sylvia’s astringent observations about