We had children of the same age. We met through friends in common. I was a writer, though not much of my work had been published, and Sylvia was a poet, which, at the time, I aspired to be.
As soon as I read her first-verse collection Colossus, I knew that she was the poet and I was not.
We talked mainly about writing and about our lives as the mothers of small children. She told me of her psychoanalysis, which had been unsuccessful because she had been given shock treatment.
Even if she was privately weighed down by her own thoughts and feelings, she never displayed her unhappiness. I remember a young man who was visiting my home when she was there offering round his cigarettes. I said regretfully that I had given up. "Why give anything up?" said Sylvia. She always gave an impression of poise, self-command, composure - not the narrow, shallow creature portrayed in this film.
It was at her own request that she came with her two small children, Nicholas and Frieda, to my house in Islington, to spend what turned out to be the last few days and nights of her life with myself and my husband.
Her depression was evident by now: controlled by a complex arrangement of uppers and downers, which she asked me to help her take in the right order at the right times. I let her sleep and cooked for her and the children. She was no longer capable of doing so - her depression made her almost trance-like: she wanted very much to care for her children but she would stand, looking at them, quite helpless.
By this point, she seemed to me to have lost faith in getting back with Ted. She had stopped loving him.
"He has emerged as such a small man," she said, adding that she thought he was utterly brutal. The film suggests the opposite.
In this dramatisation of her life, Sylvia dresses up, curls her hair, puts on make-up and opens the door of her London apartment to her husband after months of separation. That meeting probably happened. I saw her dressing carefully, in a blue and Lurex maxi-dress and doing her hair to go and meet Ted. But what passed between them is unknown.
At her funeral Ted said to me: "I told her that by summer we'd be back together at Court Green" (this was their house in Devon).
The film suggests the opposite - that he could not leave his lover, Assia, the wife of Canadian poet David Wevill, because she was pregnant, and this is portrayed as the ultimate cause of Sylvia's suicide. The point of the scene seems to be that Hughes could be faithful to a woman given a fair chance.
Assia was, indeed, pregnant - she had the baby aborted a few weeks after Sylvia's death. Later she bore Hughes a daughter. But in all other respects, the truth could not have been more different.
Hughes was unfaithful to Assia as with many other women and soon deserted her. She, too, committed suicide - after murdering her little girl, yet another terrible consequence of this story.
At the end of Plath's fourth day in our house she insisted on leaving, though we pleaded with her to stay. Did we imagine that she was going home to kill herself? Not for a moment. But I do not now believe that anything we could have done or said would have kept her from her suicide.
