Plath taught at Smith, then worked as a hospital secretary in Boston while concentrating on writing. Her diary captures the negativism that paralyzed and bedeviled her. She felt lonely and isolated at school. The best she could offer her bruised self was a grade of "middling good." The year after Ted Hughes published a critical success, The Hawk in the Rain, she failed twice, neither earning a Saxton Fellowship nor publishing verse.
After seeking guidance from Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, Plath won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959. She continued working in the clerical department of Massachusetts General Hospital while undergoing therapy. The family returned to London in December 1959, months before the birth of daughter Frieda Rebecca and a subsequent move to a Devon manor house. Plath published The Colossus and Other Poems (1962) and completed a radio play, Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices (1962), and The Bell Jar (1963). The latter, a powerful psychological novel and autobiographical study of schizophrenia, she issued under the pen name Victoria Lucas.
