Salon recently contacted Dalton, who had just retired from medical practice in London after 52 years. In that interview Dalton revealed for the first time that in early 1963 she had, in fact, been contacted by Horder to set up a consultation with Plath. According to the Plath biographies by Stevenson and Wagner-Martin, Plath only revealed her psychiatric history and the extreme nature of her current depression to Horder in late January 1963.

"John Horder and I had known each other for some time," Dalton said. "He was fully aware of my work and was with me the first time I ever spoke in public about premenstrual syndrome in 1954, at the Royal Society of Medicine. We were on the Council of General Practice together for 25 years." After calling her regarding his patient Plath, Dalton says that Horder "referred her to me. You don't have to tell me about Sylvia Plath. I was to see her, but she had killed herself before I could." After reviewing the information in Thompson's article and asked her opinion of the possibility that Plath may have suffered from PMS, Dalton said, "There is quite a lot of evidence. Oh yes, I think she had it. But the only one who really did understand [Plath] was John Horder. That's why he had called me."

Both Wagner-Martin and Stevenson, as well as several other Plath biographers, have written that Horder set up an appointment for Plath with a female doctor, sometimes referred to as a psychiatrist, in the last few days of her life. Plath refers to her plan to see a female doctor in a letter written a week before her death. Whether Horder had contacted both a psychiatrist and Dalton is unknown; when reached for comment, Horder declined further statement on Plath's death, citing his decision several years ago to say nothing more and expressing his lingering regret at what he considers his "breach of confidentiality" when he spoke publicly of Plath on an earlier occasion.

Bair, who has studied with Dalton, gave his opinion about Horder's decision to contact a PMS specialist when Plath was in an acute state of distress. "You have to consider this about John Horder. He was very well connected," said Bair. (Horder is the highly respected former president of the Royal College of General Practitioners in London.) "He most likely had access to 500 psychiatrists and 1,000 other specialists. The odds of him picking Dalton are very small -- but you don't send a patient to a colleague without having a strong belief that their specialty will help that patient. For one minor point, doctors don't have the time to take blind referrals for patients not applicable to their specialty. Neither do the patients -- especially patients in dire need of help."

After a careful review of Thompson's article, of a seven-page monthly breakdown of Plath's symptoms for 1958 through 1959 and of the documented evidence of Plath's pregnancies and postpartum symptoms of 1959 through 1962, Bair said, "If you hack through the PMDD criteria, I think that you'll find that she fits the PMDD profile."

With the publication of the unabridged journals, even more of Plath's biographical record can be assessed in light of Thompson's PMS theory. The more thorough and accurate dating of entries in journals for 1958 and 1959 in particular fleshes out the prevalence and patterning of Plath's numerous references to her physical symptoms and feelings. Among the dozens of Plath's commentaries that appear to be unique to the luteal phase of her cycles are these: "Am I living half alive?" "A peculiar hunger and thirst upon me." "I have an ominously red, sore & swollen eyelid, a queer red spot on my lip -- and this enervating fatigue like a secret and destructive fever." "My eyelid's hot stinging itch has spread ... to all my body: scalp, leg, stomach: as if an itch, infectious, lit and burned, lit and burned. I feel like scratching my skin off. And a dull torpor shutting me in my own prison of highstrung depression ... I feel about to break out in leprosy ... my eyes are killing me -- what is wrong with them."

The notorious 1958 incident with Hughes and a female university student on Plath's last day of teaching took place, as Thompson had earlier suggested and the unabridged journals now confirm, during the luteal phase of Plath's cycle; so did the memorable "button quarrel" between Plath and Hughes. Plath's "unexplained" fevers, which would recur and become immortalized in the "Ariel" period, are recorded exclusively in the luteal phase of her cycles, as are a vast majority of her chronic sinus troubles. Using both the unabridged journals to assess cyclical patterning and Plath's calendars from 1952 and 1953 (housed in the University of Indiana's Lilly Library), in which Plath recorded her periods through July 1953, it seems overwhelmingly likely that Plath was, as Thompson contended, in either the luteal or the perimenstrual phase of her menses at the time of her 1953 suicide attempt.

Even incidents that occurred during the time covered by destroyed or lost journals can be illuminated by Thompson's PMS theory, coupled with outside documentary evidence. For example, the due dates of Plath's second and third pregnancies and her weaning schedule for Frieda in 1960, all noted in her letters, clarify that three of Plath's most disastrous episodes of violent or antisocial behavior occurred during the luteal phase of her cycles, which was made even more acute by pregnancy.

Plath's December 1960 argument with Olwyn in Yorkshire, after which the sisters-in-law never saw each other again, took place when Plath was newly pregnant for the second time but in what was hormonally the late luteal phase of her cycle. One month later, in an irrational fit of jealous rage, Plath destroyed her husband's most precious possession, his leatherbound copy of the Oxford Collected Shakespeare, as well as all of his papers and works in draft on his desk; a few days later, Plath miscarried. (Miscarriage is also considered a fairly common symptom of severe PMS.)

Five months later, now pregnant for the third time, Plath wreaked chaos during a vacation to France at the summer home of poet W.S. Merwin and his wife, Dido, a holiday from hell recounted with indelible animus by Dido Merwin in Stevenson's Plath biography. Again, the trip's date places Plath in the late luteal phase of her cycle.

The unabridged journals reveal that on March 20, 1959, Plath's psychoanalyst told her that "cramps are all mental after arguing against natural childbirth, saying pain was real," which could only have served to increase Plath's inability to connect her symptoms to a cause that was beyond her control. Though Plath's cramps and many more of her symptoms were physically, palpably expressed, their impact on her interior, "mental" life was equally real. Plath endlessly noted her agonizing symptoms, castigated herself for her inability to gain control over her life, even dreamed frequently about her periods, and yet could not make the connection between her cycles of fertility and cycles of torment.

"Yesterday was a horror," Plath wrote during the luteal phase of her cycle in March 1958. "Ted said something about the moon and Saturn to explain the curse which strung me tight as a wire and twanged unmercifully." A month later, Plath describes a nightmare in which she watches a "diamond moon" passing by before she becomes a moon herself: "I was lifted, up, my stomach & face toward earth, as if hung perpendicular in mid-air of a room with a pole through my middle & someone twirling me about on it ... & my whole equilibrium went off, giddy, as I spun & they spun below & I heard surgical, distant, stellar voices discussing me & my experimental predicament & planning what to do next."

Plath's journal is crowded with references to the moon, which notably worked itself into her poetry; a journal entry from 1950 that had appeared in the 1982 edition takes on even greater metaphoric meaning in light of the PMS theory:

Tonight I wanted to step outside for a few moments before going to bed, it was so snug and stale-aired in the house. I was in my pajamas, my freshly washed hair up on curlers. So I tried to open the front door. The lock snapped as I turned it; I tried the handle. The door wouldn't open. Annoyed, I turned the handle the other way. No response. I twisted the lock ... still the door was stuck, white, blank and enigmatic. I glanced up. Through the glass square, high in the door, I saw a block of sky, pierced by the sharp black points of the pines across the street. And there was the moon, almost full, luminous and yellow, behind the trees. I felt suddenly breathless, stifled. I was trapped, with the tantalizing little square of night above me, and the warm, feminine atmosphere of the house enveloping me in its thick, feathery smothering embrace.

The unabridged journals now date Plath's writing of "Moonrise," a poem metaphorically meditating on the "boney mother" moon and hopes of pregnancy ("The berries purple/and bleed. The white stomach may ripen yet"), as having been written in Plath's luteal phase. The poem "Metaphors" -- the metaphors being those for pregnancy -- was completed on March 20, 1959, in the perimenstrual phase, presumably begun when Plath still thought she might be pregnant. ("March 20, Friday. Yesterday a nadir of sorts ... Pregnant, I thought. No such luck.")

Another poem, "A Life," in which a woman drags her shadow around the moon but has been exorcised of "grief and anger," was completed on Nov. 18, 1960, and so was written during the week in which Plath (according to the dates she gave her mother) must have ovulated and become pregnant for the second time. Because Plath's subject matter in these poems is so blatantly and directly linked to the phase of her menstrual cycle at the time the poems were written, their specific dating and the circumstances of their production give more credence to Thompson's conclusions about Plath's menstrual cycles affecting the creation of poems during the "Ariel" period, for which there is no dated evidence of menstrual cycles.

The unabridged journals reveal some problems with Thompson's theory, but they are mostly minor dating mistakes that don't ultimately undermine her findings. The more important point made evident by the unabridged journals is that Plath's mood swings did not run on as predictable a schedule as Thompson assumed. Though Plath's physical symptoms evaporate almost miraculously with the onset of her periods, her emotional turmoil remains unpredictable throughout the month. The diagnostic definitions for PMS and PMDD state that symptoms "are always absent in the week after menses"; however, Bair has noticed in his clinical practice that with PMS, depression "is the slowest symptom to clear, and in fact seems to build up over time," coupled with the decline of a woman's self-esteem as she finds herself unable to control her emotions. Several studies on PMS corroborate Bair's observations.

The years for which we have the most consistent and detailed menstrual data for Plath, 1958 and 1959, are unfortunately years in which Plath was also sunk in a long-term depression over her teaching job and her consequent writer's block. It is, then, almost impossible to sort Plath's emotional responses to potential PMS from her ongoing depression.

The years 1952 and 1953, two years for which we also have accurate dating of Plath's menses, are years in which Plath's emotional life is far more varied and the trajectory of her deepening depression is easier to detect; and yet even during these early years Plath's moods do not consistently correspond to her cycles in a way that points unquestionably at PMS. It may be, as is often the case with PMS sufferers, that Plath's PMS worsened as she grew older; it may also be that something else was at work in Plath's biological war with her selves.

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