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hated the fact that when she moved to Wellesley, she had to repeat fifth grade. Her mother was no doubt right in deciding that Sylvia was too young (almost two years younger than students in the sixth grade would be) to go into sixth grade in Wellesley. The more relaxed fifth-grade schedule allowed Sylvia to become a star Girl Scout, earning eleven badges in that single year.
    Photographs from the early 1940s show Sylvia as tall and attractive, her dark blonde hair worn in long braids with fluffy bangs. Her legginess was as noticeable as her toothiness, and each gave her a sense of being a little oversized. She was more shy in Wellesley than she had been in Winthrop. She spent much of her time reading books and writing extra book reports, forty of them. There are some signs that Sylvia was already creating the ideal “Wellesley self,” who appeared confident, happy, poised, excited by life. She was a child robbed of her beloved sea and shore, separated from her best friends, and frightened by her mother’s serious illnesses, but she did as she was told and got all A’s in school, despite being the “new girl.”
    War darkened 1942 and 1943. For a family as committed to their country as the Schobers and Plaths were, following evening war news on the radio was imperative. The radio voice that could not be interrupted spread its pall of anxiety over the household, especially because young Frank was a lieutenant in the Medical Corps abroad. Sylvia had vivid memories of wartime paper drives, blackouts, rationing.
    Life at 26 Elmwood Road eventually stabilized. Aurelia’s health improved, and she felt more confident about teaching college. Her program at Boston University became so successful that she taught there for the next twenty-nine years, teaching one course in shorthand and transcription to make her position full-time. Throughout her teaching years, Aurelia usually returned home before the children. When they came home from school, as a rule, both Aurelias were there to welcome them: their mother the college teacher and their grandmother, whom Sylvia described as “Viennese ... Victorian” at work in the kitchen, humming and thumping bread dough.
    Despite the loss of her father, Sylvia’s childhood in Wellesley seemed rich in many ways. She accumulated pets — Mowgli, a tiger alley cat, parakeets, and a tame squirrel. She rode her bike on Wellesley’s wide sidewalks, exploring the Hunnewell fields and tennis courts, Morse’s pond just two blocks away, and Lake Waban. She and Betsy Powley, her new best friend, were intrigued by the woods at the edge of a new subdivision, and sometimes built huts of fern there on summer days.
    For all her studious bent, Sylvia was more of an outdoor girl than an indoor one. She responded honestly to weather, hating the cold, opening out into the sunlight as if she drew physical nourishment from it. Sun was as important to her as the sea had been, and even though her yard was shady she managed to sunbathe much of the spring and summer.
    After her two years at Marshall Perrin Elementary School, with nearly perfect grades and a reputation for excellence, Sylvia entered the Alice L. Phillips Junior High for her seventh, eighth, and ninth grades. The dull red-brick building was located near the center of town, not far from the Unitarian Church where Aurelia Plath taught a weekly Sunday School class. Sylvia was a serious, intelligent student, interested in achievement and recognition, dutiful about working hard. She was comfortable with older people as well as classmates, and some of her own friends came from associations of her mother’s.
    Aurelia had moved to Wellesley partly because several of her friends from Boston University lived there. Long before Otto’s death, Margaret Brace, wife of novelist Gerald Brace, and Mildred Norton, the mother of Sylvia’s friend Perry and his brother, Dick, had made special efforts to befriend Aurelia, suspecting that her marriage was not an easy