Wintering: a novel of Sylvia Plath

Reviewed by Jennifer Jeffrey

Countless books have been written about Sylvia Plath since she committed suicide on a cold February day in 1963. Each one has speculated on her relationship with her husband Ted Hughes and the reasons why she took her own life.

I confess that I have not read a single one of them.

That is, not until I met Kate Moses at a recent writers' convention and listened to her speak about Wintering, the novel she wrote that re-imagines the last two years of Sylvia Plath’s life. Moses was inspired to write the novel after she discovered that the poems that make up Ariel, the collection widely regarded as Plath’s artistic triumph, were published in a different sequence than Plath originally intended.

Kate believes that Sylvia was meticulous about the order of her work and had a distinct message to deliver, not only in each individual piece, but also in the precise narrative arc of their arrangement. In the original order, the first word of the first poem is "love" and the last word of the last poem is "spring." The last poem was Wintering.

Wintering, the novel, is a lush rendering of Sylvia’s life between 1961 and 1963. It is arranged in 41 chapters, named after the poems in Ariel, in the order that Plath first arranged them. The events that the novel describes are factual; the dialogue and some of the attendant details are imagined. The chapters weave back and forth between the painful winter of 1962, after Ted Hughes had left Plath for another woman, and she was alone with her two young children, and the year prior, when the happy family was together on Court Green. The back-and-forth can be a bit disconcerting at times, but it effectively paints a multi-layered picture of each area of Plath’s life: marriage, writing, motherhood, ambition. The language is richly textured, thick with descriptions of smells and sights and textures, so laden with adjectives that it feels heady at times.

I read this book looking for clues. Clues as to what it means to be a writer; to be woman. As to how to fight with the demons, both real and imagined. As to how to balance a sense of overwhelming love for someone with the real need to be an individual. That Plath struggled with mental illness does not make her that many degrees different than the rest of us; it just makes the resolution of her conflicting selves that much harder.

Moses doesn’t supply us with pat answers; she is realistic about the difficulties implicit in a marriage between two fiercely artistic people and the near impossibility of balancing motherhood and career.

We all know what happens in the end; Moses graciously spares us any description of that awful day by choosing to end the story a few days before Plath dies, and focuses instead upon the incredible work that this woman created in the year before her death.

That work, ultimately, is Sylvia Plath’s legacy. Not her suicide or her devastated marriage, but the poems and works that depict loss and love and longing in vivid, heart-wrenching turns of phrase that still inspire this girl-woman thirty years later. What happens when we are all alone, in the dark, with a cacophony of voices in our heads and only the written word to save us?

Wintering: a novel of Sylvia Plath. Paperback, Anchor Books. $13.00

Ariel: Poems by Sylvia Plath. Paperback, Perennial Classics. $12.00

Kate Moses’ web site: http://www.katemoses.com