The End in the Beginning: On Sylvia & Ted

01.23.2026

Above: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes at home in 1958. Photograph by James Coyne / Black Star.

By Olivia O'Connor, Dramaturg for SYLVIA SYLVIA SYLVIA

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes moved to Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood in September 1958. They were young, full of optimism and ambition. For the first time in their coupledom—and their lives—they intended to live off of writing alone.

Since their marriage two years earlier, the couple had rarely been apart. And though they came from very different worlds, their shared devotion to writing would forever bind their lives, work, and legacies.

Sylvia had been raised in Massachusetts: first in Boston, then in the seaside town of Winthrop, and finally in suburban Wellesley. Her father, Otto, died when she was eight, leaving Plath’s mother Aurelia to raise her two children alone. The grief of Otto’s death would eventually make its way into some of Plath’s most iconic writing, as would her close—and sometimes claustrophobic—relationship with her mother.

Sylvia published her first poem not long before her ninth birthday. She was a prolific young writer, relentless in sending out work through her teenage years; by the time of her first short story acceptance in Seventeen, she’d had more than fifty stories rejected. An exceptional student, she earned a scholarship to Smith College, a prestigious Seven Sisters school, in 1950. At Smith, Plath’s social calendar was as packed as her academic courseload. But amidst the many highs of college life, she also experienced crushing lows of overwhelm and despondency.

Things came to a head the summer after Plath’s junior year, when she earned a guest editorship at Mademoiselle magazine. Though initially thrilled by the opportunity, Plath’s month in New York left her disillusioned and exhausted. She returned home to Wellesley in a fog of insomnia, depression, and writer’s block. In August, she attempted suicide, ingesting a bottle of sleeping pills and concealing herself in the crawlspace of her family home. She was found, barely alive, three days later. The writer and benefactor who had funded Plath’s Smith scholarship, Olive Higgins Prouty, was insistent upon finding Plath better treatment for her depression. She used her connections to gain Sylvia admittance to McLean Hospital—an upscale treatment center for psychiatric disorders in Belmont, Massachusetts—and paid the bills for her stay. After four months at McLean under the guidance of psychiatrist Ruth Beuscher, Plath returned to Smith for the spring semester. Years later, she would draw on the experiences of 1953 for her semiautobiographical novel The Bell Jar.

While Sylvia’s upbringing was inextricably linked to the New England coast, Ted Hughes’s childhood landscape was that of the Yorkshire moors. He was born to a working-class family in Mytholmroyd, in the Calder Valley of West Yorkshire, England. Though his parents moved him and his two older siblings to Mexborough, a more industrial town, when he was eight, Ted maintained his connection to the idyllic landscape of his youth. With a worldview forged by camping, hunting, and fishing, Ted made nature central to his later writing.

Ted, like Sylvia, showed an aptitude for writing at a young age, publishing his first poem just before his sixteenth birthday. He earned the marks to gain an exhibition to Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1949, but delayed his entrance for two years to serve a mandatory National Service term in the Royal Air Force. In 1951, he headed to Cambridge.

It was there that he and Sylvia met, in February 1956. She was in her first year at Newnham College, studying on a Fulbright Fellowship, and had already published in The Nation, Harpers, and The Atlantic. Ted, who had graduated in 1954, had as yet published only in college magazines—including one he co-founded, the St. Botolph’s Review. Sylvia received a copy of the magazine (its only published issue) the day it came out and was impressed; she decided to attend the release party that night. The electric meeting that followed has since fused itself into the couple’s mythology: Sylvia quoted Ted’s poetry to him, they drank brandy and kissed in a back room, Ted ripped Sylvia’s headband off her head and earrings from her ears, and Sylvia bit him on the cheek, drawing blood.

Though the intellectual and sexual ferocity of the meeting hit both Hughes and Plath hard, the two didn’t immediately start dating; Ted was in a relationship and living in London, and Sylvia was still hung up on a recent beau, Richard Sassoon. But the following month, Ted invited Sylvia to visit him in London, and their passion for one another took hold. They married on June 16, 1956, less than four months after their first meeting. That fall, Ted moved to Cambridge, and their life together began in earnest.

Plath and Hughes were voracious in their appetites: for reading, writing, eating, and each other. Each spoke of the other as a “genius,” and they were each other’s best critics and catalysts. As they shared drafts and revisions, their subjects and styles grew in the influence of the other. Both poets were interested in pushing against the decorative formality of the era’s popular poetry (a style that had influenced Plath’s own early work), and both shared an aesthetic commitment to making bold, visceral art rooted in the mysteries of nature.

Plath also applied her professionalism to Hughes’s poems, typing and submitting work on his behalf. She changed the trajectory of his career when, in November 1956, she decided to submit a collection of Ted’s poems, rather than her own, for a prestigious first book prize in America. Hughes’s collection, The Hawk in the Rain, won the competition (and thus publication), setting the stage for the couple’s move to the States. The award also shifted their professional standing, with Hughes suddenly anointed one of the most promising young poets of his generation and Plath still toiling as an accomplished, but unfamous, poet. However, Sylvia took immense pride in Ted’s success, claiming that she found more joy in his publication than she would have in her own.

The couple arrived in America in June 1957. After summer travels in celebration of their marriage, they settled into Northampton to begin their new life. Sylvia had gotten a teaching job at her alma mater, Smith; the following spring, Ted took on a job teaching at Amherst. They both struggled: Ted found American culture artificial and materialistic, while Sylvia found teaching exhausting and detrimental to her own writing.

As a result, they made two plans for the future: one, they would leave teaching and spend a year in Boston, living off of their savings and whatever they could make from writing. Two, they would return to England, at least for a time, at the end of their Boston year.

Though the Boston era didn’t quite live up to its ideal (Sylvia ended up taking two part-time jobs), both writers published frequently. Ted wrote poems that would eventually appear in Lupercal, as well as prose, plays, and children’s stories. Sylvia wrote short stories and poetry, generated ideas for The Bell Jar, and worked on her lost novel Falcon Yard, which was inspired by her courtship with Hughes. There were happy times, but Sylvia sometimes worried that her creative work was suffering in the partnership. In September 1958, she wrote in her journal of “the famed & fatal jealousy of professionals,” and wondered, “Do we, vampire-like, feed on each other? A wall, sound-proof, must mount between us. Strangers in our study, lovers in bed.”

The two returned to England in December 1959, following a cross-country road trip and a productive residency at Yaddo. As they sailed across the Atlantic, the couple looked to be heading towards a period of abundance: Sylvia was pregnant with their daughter Frieda and had recently received an invitation from the publisher Heinemann to send a collection of her poems; the following year, it would be published as The Colossus and Other Poems. Ted’s fame was growing, and he’d received word that his second collection, Lupercal, would be published by Faber and Faber. They would join the literary scene of London with their professional stars on the rise and their domestic life blooming.

But the years that followed proved more complicated. Sylvia’s The Colossus and The Bell Jar had modest success; Ted’s Lupercal was met with rapturous reviews. They had another child, Nicholas, and moved to a large country house in Devon. Finally, they had ample space to write: Ted had an office in the attic, and Sylvia on the second floor. But things soon fell apart. Ted undertook an affair that shattered the marriage, and Sylvia moved back to London and tried to start anew.

Plath wrote career-defining poetry throughout the breakup: the celebrated poems of Ariel, which filtered autobiographical details through language that was symbolic, surreal, and full of life—a voice entirely Plath’s own. But she also faced daunting circumstances. Single motherhood loomed, with all of its social stigma and financial burden. So did the threat of institutionalization: Plath’s depression and insomnia were worsening, and she hadn’t yet found effective treatment. Over the course of a historically cold London winter, during which she and the children were isolated and frequently sick, Plath’s mental health deteriorated. She died by suicide in February 1963, gassing herself in her apartment’s kitchen after making sure her children were safe, their window open and door meticulously sealed off in the bedroom above.

As we hear in SYLVIA SYLVIA SYLVIA, “Looking back, you can always see the end in the beginning.” Plath’s end is often the prism through which her life and work is read. The same is true for Hughes, as well, though he lived another thirty-five years after Sylvia’s death. Even in his own poetry, his and Sylvia’s relationship is seen in retrospect: Birthday Letters, published just before his death in 1998, views their love as fated, doomed: ill-omened from their first meeting. In SYLVIA SYLVIA SYLVIA, we see a glimpse of the couple before the myth took hold—and a glimpse of another couple, as well, whose myth has yet to be written.

SYLVIA SYLVIA SYLVIA

FEB 4 – MAR 8, 2026
WORLD PREMIERE
GIL CATES THEATER

Written by Beth Hyland
Directed by Jo Bonney
Featuring Midori Francis, Marianna Gailus, Noah Keyishian & Cillian O’Sullivan

Sally, a once-celebrated novelist grappling with writer's block and overshadowed by her husband Theo’s rising literary fame, seeks solace and inspiration in the iconic Boston apartment once inhabited by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. But when eerie encounters begin to blur the line between inspiration and madness, Sally is forced to question what’s real, what’s imagined, and what her art may truly cost her. A darkly funny, gripping world premiere from rising playwright Beth Hyland, this tragicomic thriller explores creativity, obsession, and our ghosts that refuse to be ignored.

Recipient of the Edgerton Foundation New Play Award. Major support for this world premiere production provided by the Edgerton Foundation New Play Production Fund.

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