![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The night Rich and Plath met in 1958, Hughes had given a reading at Harvard’s Longfellow Hall, and afterwards Jack Sweeney-the curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room-had a crowd over for cocktails. To them, Rich was the wife of Alfred Conrad-economist and professor at Harvard-and raising two children with a third on the way, and Plath was the wife of Ted Hughes, well on his way to becoming Poet Laureate of England. Neither of this mattered all that much to the society they kept: liberal men and women still stuck in the patriarchal mode of post-war fifties America. Rich’s first book had already been chosen by Auden for publication as part of the Yale Younger Poets Series, and Plath, though barely known as a poet, had published scores of short stories in women’s magazines, done the famous internship at Mademoiselle that would provide the material for The Bell Jar, and received a Fulbright to study at Cambridge. It wasn’t that they didn’t have careers of their own. But in 1958, as both of their biographers argue, the two writers were stuck in a similar situation: that of the smiling, university wife. ![]() Five years later, Plath would be dead after leaving the gas on in her flat in London, and fifteen years later, Rich would shift into her most famous mode, that of a radical feminist lesbian thinker. Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich hung out once at a party in Cambridge, MA. ![]()
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