This is the story of a woman forging a new life for herself after her marriage has foundered, shutting up her beloved Devonshire house and making a home for her two young children in London, elated at completing the collection of poems she foresees will make her name. It is also the story of a woman struggling to maintain her mental equilibrium, to absorb the pain of her husband's betrayal and to resist her mother's engulfing love. It is the story of Sylvia Plath.
In this deeply felt novel, Kate Moses recreates Sylvia Plath's last months, weaving in the background of her life before she met Ted Hughes through to the disintegration of their relationship and the burst of creativity this triggered. It is inspired by Plath's original ordering and selection of the poems in Ariel, which begins with the word 'love' and ends with 'spring,' a mythic narrative of defiant survival quite different from the chronological version edited by Hughes. At Wintering's heart, though, lie the two weeks in December when Plath finds herself still alone and grief-stricken, despite all her determined hope. With exceptional empathy and lyrical grace, Moses captures her poignant, untenable and courageous struggle to confront not only her future as a woman, an artist and a mother, but the unbanished demons of her past.
This is the story of a woman forging a new life for herself after her marriage has foundered, shutting up her beloved Devonshire house and making a home for her two young children in London, elated at completing the collection of poems she foresees will make her name. It is also the story of a woman struggling to maintain her mental equilibrium, to absorb the pain of her husband's betrayal and to resist her mother's engulfing love. It is the story of Sylvia Plath.
In this deeply felt novel, Kate Moses recreates Sylvia Plath's last months, weaving in the background of her life before she met Ted Hughes through to the disintegration of their relationship and the burst of creativity this triggered. It is inspired by Plath's original ordering and selection of the poems in Ariel, which begins with the word 'love' and ends with 'spring,' a mythic narrative of defiant survival quite different from the chronological version edited by Hughes. At Wintering's heart, though, lie the two weeks in December when Plath finds herself still alone and grief-stricken, despite all her determined hope. With exceptional empathy and lyrical grace, Moses captures her poignant, untenable and courageous struggle to confront not only her future as a woman, an artist and a mother, but the unbanished demons of her past.
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Overview
This is the story of a woman forging a new life for herself after her marriage has foundered, shutting up her beloved Devonshire house and making a home for her two young children in London, elated at completing the collection of poems she foresees will make her name. It is also the story of a woman struggling to maintain her mental equilibrium, to absorb the pain of her husband's betrayal and to resist her mother's engulfing love. It is the story of Sylvia Plath.
In this deeply felt novel, Kate Moses recreates Sylvia Plath's last months, weaving in the background of her life before she met Ted Hughes through to the disintegration of their relationship and the burst of creativity this triggered. It is inspired by Plath's original ordering and selection of the poems in Ariel, which begins with the word 'love' and ends with 'spring,' a mythic narrative of defiant survival quite different from the chronological version edited by Hughes. At Wintering's heart, though, lie the two weeks in December when Plath finds herself still alone and grief-stricken, despite all her determined hope. With exceptional empathy and lyrical grace, Moses captures her poignant, untenable and courageous struggle to confront not only her future as a woman, an artist and a mother, but the unbanished demons of her past.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466869134 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/22/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 303 |
| Sales rank: | 689,235 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Kate Moses was born in San Francisco in 1962 to a British father and an American mother, and grew up in various parts of the United States before returning to California to attend university. She subsequently worked as an editor in publishing and as literary director at San Francisco's Intersection for the Arts, and in 1997 became one of the two founding editors of Salon.com's Mothers Who Think website, which led to the American Book Award-winning anthology Mothers Who Think, co-edited with Camille Peri. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and their two children. Wintering is her first novel.
Hometown:
San Francisco, CaliforniaDate of Birth:
April 9, 1962Place of Birth:
San Francisco, CaliforniaEducation:
B.A., University of the Pacific, 1984Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
"Morning Song"
December 12, 1962 5:30 A.M. London
Gold seeping under her eyelids. Sleeping pills worn off, effortlessly obsolete as breath, their expiration reeling her fast from the silty floor of sleep to the surface, awake. It's morning, or almost: a slow December sun rises through her curtainless bedroom windows, snagging on her rumpled bedcovers, dragging its faint eastern light across her face. Her borrowed single bed is thoroughly churned, coverlet bunched and askew, leaving her exposed in nothing but a nightgown on one unblanketed side, the flannel stiff with cold. She has grown accustomed to tense, motionless drug-sleeps these last months, bedclothes still tucked with hospital precision between mattress and box spring when she wakes. Pinning her still as a crated statue to her bed, binding her in taut cotton like a mummy, like a dangerous patient. Like a patient, more accurately, paralyzed with fear. Trapped in her bedding: it's a feeling that's been not entirely uncomfortable. Not much else has held her since summer.
But something today is changed. More than her untroubled night, her turning in sleep as easily as a fish. Could one call what she's beginning to feel, coming awake just now, ruby light radiating through the fine tissue of her closed eyes, happiness? Not that, but something close, though more hollow, tentative, and just faintly perceptible: serenity? Curiosity? Amazing: she's flown in a clean trajectory straight from the blank infinities of sleep to something one could characterize as pleasant. Normal, like other people, waking on normal days. Expectant; anticipating good to come. Compared to her usual dawn aftertaste of despair, this sensation seems positively optimistic, untethered as an escaped balloon — a feeling almost like the first days of falling in love.
What has happened to her customary morning dread, the sharp stink of her panic? Where is her more orthodox heart with its quick metallic ticking, the grinding in her chest? Her mind searches for it, that familiar hemorrhage of fear, the known morning ritual of materializing terror — the terror of what she doesn't know as much as what she does — that has greeted her upon waking since July. She listens: as if it might be recoverable, lost for a moment here in the covers, lurking still in the chill air of the heatless room. It's gone, though, for this morning, receded like the tide for these quick seconds of semiconscious assessment, of her life coming into focus.
Then she remembers: she's in London. Yeats's house with its blue enamel plaque by the door. It's hers — her new home in the city. She's out of the rural purgatory of Devon, the red muck and bawling animals and isolation of her crumbling ancient farmhouse, home now in a poet's flat that seemed fated for her. All hers — she didn't have to share credit with anyone. But there he is, inevitably: Ted.
He'd met her at the train station the day she'd come house-hunting last month, an inscrutable shadow shambling along behind through three dank, unacceptable maisonettes. Though it was later, after he'd escaped their latest failure into the tiled entrance of the Chalk Farm tube, his black back hunched in his coat and descending into dark as she watched him leave, another step, the ring of his boot on the stair, so quickly it was over —
It was later, on her own, when she'd seen the sign on her way to her London doctor's office, her infected thumb oozy and pink, rotting apple swollen, pulsing out its distress on her hand. Hurrying over the footbridge and down the Georgian arcade of Gloucester Avenue, her thumb in its bandages aloft and signalling her defeat, then around the corner and suddenly FLATS TO LET next to the blue sign. Address: 23 Fitzroy Road.
As if she'd conjured it: two years ago, she happened upon a freehold for sale on this same street before they'd ever dreamed of Court Green, of its acres of volunteer daffodils and cool twelfth-century walls, of their son born in a gush under its birded thatch, of their gardens, their fingers stained red with Devonshire loam. Two years ago in London, she raced home with Frieda in the pram to their tiny apartment off Chalcot Square — just a block away from where she lies now in her cold bed — bursting to tell Ted: what a benediction (if they could have only afforded it) to live on Yeats's street! Then three months ago in Ballylee, on the last shattering trip together, having climbed the spiral stair to the Irish poet's tower and thrown three pennies for luck, casting them eyes closed into the river sluicing the bridge below, she'd wished for something she then didn't know how to name — something, something she needed to fall into place, her life to right itself, her writing, her disintegrating marriage, something she needed to stop, Ted — she thought then it was Ireland for the winter that she needed. The far sea, its purifying salt and slow clouds, its ginger-scented turf fires in the grate, something equal to Ted's plan of flight to Spain; that's what she thought she'd been wishing for. But she was wrong. Their trip was a disaster. They left Ireland separately, Sylvia returning alone to Devon and the children. Ted wired her a few days later from London. For six years she had feared, even fantasized, shuddering at her garish imaginings, that someone would lure him away. Now someone had. He had come back just once to Court Green, to get his things; if she sued for divorce, he said he wouldn't stop her. He had left her. Her marriage was over.
There is no doubt in her mind: it was this house she'd wished for, unknowingly, from Yeats's tower. This house is going to be her salvation. God, she's made it. She braces for the chill and peels the blankets back. Her mauve wool bathrobe is retrieved from its position of abandonment on the coverlet, tugged over the shoulders of her eyelet-edged floral nightgown; her feet pivot to the hardwood floor. The cold hits her footsoles like a slap. Appropriate, this robe, its color: as if wrapping herself up in a bruise. Her heart feels light enough on this day that she can snatch a quick glimpse of objectivity, even endorse a little self-mocking criticism. In the corner beyond the bed, out of the children's reach, huddles one of the squat electric heaters she brought from Court Green. She tugs its cord out of the wall and scoots it, hugging her bathrobe to her, across the floor toward her desk.
She'd known this house was her omen as soon as she saw it; she's been counting on it (while the leasing agent sluggishly pondered her references) for a month. Jokingly, back at Court Green after finding the flat, she'd pulled out a volume of Yeats's plays from the bookshelves in the front parlor and told Sue the baby-minder she was looking for a sign. She needed benevolent spirits; she needed all the protection she could gather to herself. The page fell open, her finger marking a line in The Unicorn from the Stars: Get wine and food to give you strength and courage, and I will get the house ready.
In the fall orchard at Court Green, seventy-two trees hung with apples. She had borrowed a neighbor's long-handled picker and harvested all she could, a canvas sack slung across her breastbone, a three-legged ladder moving with her through the orchard, propped against the gnarled old trunks. Victoria cookers ripe in September, picked with Ted in joyless silence before the final Ireland rupture; then Pig's Noses and russeted Bramley's Seedlings in October, all layered now in straw in the wine cellar at Court Green but for the bag she filled for London. The honey from her new bees, also, she extracted, leaving the bees enough to winter over, supplemented with plates of sugar syrup, pie tins slow with Tate & Lyle left beneath the bare-branched fruit trees. Potatoes and onions as well dug up, the potatoes scrubbed, the dry platinum hair of the onions braided in a day-long session before the movers came. Just prior to leaving, with Sue amusing the babies and toting the last loads of storybooks and toys out to the Morris Traveller, she carried her clippers and an old pillowcase across the front lawn and cut a treacherous armload of holly. It was downstairs now, arranged in her pewter vase in the unpainted parlor, its red berries plump and shiny, the white-tipped leaves still green and supple, sharp as razors.
The houses lining the mews this dawn behind Fitzroy Road are edged in pink, suspended in a pastel nimbus of foggy illumination as the sun creeps beyond their rooftops. At her desk before the window, Sylvia sits in the sunrise quiet, her room, her papers, her flannel nightgown washed in thin blue light. She's risen today as she has every day since Ted left her in Ireland in September: While her two children sleep in their cribs, she has gone to her desk before sunrise, a habit begun as a way to give form to her suddenly nebulous days. Sleepless with the unknown, scenes from her marriage unreeling like a nightmare movie in her head, she needed a defense to stave off the creep of her misery.
It started as a helpful suggestion from her practical Devon midwife. With her husband gone and no help with the children, mornings before Frieda and Nicholas woke were Sylvia's only time to think or to write. Being alone had transformed so menacingly: with two babies in diapers, solitude had once seemed such a luxury. It had become, this fall, more of a sentence.
She wasn't sure, at first, that she could either think or write: her mind paced like an animal, desperate to flee, to connect, too frantic to do either. But something happened in those predawn mornings at her desk, some alchemy that distilled, concentrating her pain, dripping her fury into a purified essence, her own hot eau de vie. She had been struggling to write like this for years. Then Ted left, and the real muse moved in. Her poems had been flaming up, sparking, dangerous, for months. There was no sign of them stopping.
Blessed Sue the baby-minder — she'd arrived when Sylvia, too, was burning white hot, back at October's end, after a comedically unsuitable (comedic only in retrospect) string of temporary nannies — dour or disapproving or far too dear, one lasting all of an afternoon. The daughter of her Devon midwife's friend, a young nurse on break from her children's hospital job in London, Sue had been a godsend, a lifesaver. With Sue in the house watching the babies, Sylvia had not only been able to recover from the chronic viruses that had kept her feverish since summer — the endless flu, the sinus infections — but had also been able to work for unbroken hours during the day: twenty poems finished since Sue arrived, thirteen of them book poems. And with them the book: the manuscript of her second poetry collection, complete. The poems as well as the London flat found, Nicholas weaned, Court Green packed up and closed, she and the children successfully moved to London: all this with Sue's help. And it was cheerful Sue who kept Sylvia as well as the children company, who cock-horsed Nicholas on her knees and admired Frieda's puzzle and erased the gloom with her chatter while Sylvia prepared dinner or tea each day. Who made it obvious that what Sylvia needed was not a cold, professional nanny but a mother's helper in the truest sense: maybe an au pair, a young, smart, energetic girl like Sue, someone to help with the children and the house, but someone, also, to help Sylvia keep her own loneliness at bay. In Yeats's flat, Sylvia has settled both children into the largest of the three bedrooms and put a desk in her own. This leaves a third bedroom for an au pair, to be hired as soon as possible, as soon as Sylvia can find a suitable girl.
That to do, and finish moving in: painting the walls and the floors. Unpacking the boxes in the kitchen: the copper wedding cookware, her mother's Bavarian dish set brought from Wellesley last summer. Sewing curtains and pillows on her second-hand Singer machine. Hanging the few prints and etchings she's brought, putting up bookshelves. Ordering a double bed, perhaps more furniture if the flat still looks bare after her new chairs and straw carpets arrive. Painting the three bureaus delivered yesterday — blue, she has decided, is her London color, inspired by months of watching dawn light: smoky dark blues, teals, navies, midnights. No more red: red was Court Green. The pink-washed walls trimmed in glossy white. The deep red carpet on the stairs, the Indian rugs in her study and the parlor and the bedrooms, the corduroy curtains she'd sewn. The few precious strawberries from plants not killed by late frost. The hearts-and-flowers she'd enameled on the children's furniture, on the used beehive given to them in June, on her sewing machine. Court Green was the home they'd made with their own hands. Of course it was red; it was the interior of her heart. It gave her a stab to think of it —
She wouldn't think of it now. Blue was for London. She'd already bought the paint.
She'd bought the paint, gone to the Gas Board and the leasing office, pleaded again with the post office for an earlier telephone hookup — it might be weeks without a phone in the flat — run errands and marketed in Camden Town, even put some hurried order to their piles of disheveled belongings. All this, again, accomplished with help: Sue had stayed one more day after their arrival in London. Without some sort of backup, caring for the children and finishing the move will absorb most of Sylvia's energy for weeks. She only prays that she and the babies stay well; as it is, she'll be too preoccupied to write until they are firmly settled into the flat. This, then, is her moment of satiation, the thrumming lull, the wing beat of a poet at rest. It was almost Christmas as well, a thought not nearly as grim as it had seemed a few weeks ago. There was shopping to do for the children, decorations — the holly was a start — to be made or found.
And she has a deep need, admittedly, to create this order. After the protracted months of not knowing how her fate would play itself, stunned by the melodrama her life had become, feeling herself flinch at every new, sordid revelation, she knows now where she stands: her husband has become a liar and a cheat, a man she doesn't recognize. He has killed their marriage. He's carried it away, limp in his hands, and forked it over with dirt; she'll never find it again. She'll go back to her home in the spring. Who would know then, who could remember — daffodils waving their yellow heads by the thousands on the April hillside, lilac blowing over the nettled yard in May — what death happened there? The blood, by then, the gory evidence, would be gone, faded from sight. Now, in December, she has a wintering place, perhaps somewhat dormant as it is, but alive to all she has planned. She is a writer in a sleeping indigo city of writers, waiting for everyone else to wake up.
She's impressed, sitting at her desk, astounded even, at her own tranquility. Since July — since she first confronted Ted about his affair — she's been counting the days, the hours, for a moment like this: to feel herself rising above the ugly episodes of her recent life. It's her poems and this move that have done it, that are spoon-feeding her the self-confidence she needs. They are her nectar, her royal jelly; she'll emerge from this stronger than she was. She feels like a warrior queen, poised, victorious in her bathrobe.
No noise, yet, from the nursery. No grumbling squawk and cot rattling from baby Nick or birdlike treble chatter from her two-year-old girl. She'll take this moment of peace, then, if that's what it is, and put herself totally to rights. Before her, on and about the desk, are files of poems, all she's written during the fall as well as some of those that followed her first collection published two years ago. She picks up a string-tied packet that she dropped in haste yesterday onto a stack of unpacked boxes. Wrapped in brown paper is a spring-clasp binder with stiff black boards, purchased while she rushed about yesterday in the Morris wagon. Slipping the binder free and resting it against her lap, she lifts the top file from the stack before her on the desk, slides the sheets from between the file's manila leaves. She holds in her hand a manuscript, a stack of poems half an inch thick, composed on the reverse side of a variety of papers: crisp pink Smith College memorandum sheets; a handwritten draft of one of Ted's early plays, The Calm; and the opening chapters of her own first novel, which will be pseudonymously published, British edition only, just after the new year — The Bell Jar.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Wintering"
by .
Copyright © 2003 Kate Moses.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
1. "Morning Song",
2. "The Couriers",
3. "The Rabbit Catcher",
4. "Thalidomide",
5. "The Applicant",
6. "Barren Woman",
7. "Lady Lazarus",
8. "Tulips",
9. "A Secret",
10. "The Jailor",
11. "Cut",
12. "Elm",
13. "The Night Dances",
14. "The Detective",
15. "Ariel",
16. "Death & Co.",
17. "Magi",
18. "Lesbos",
19. "The Other",
20. "Stopped Dead",
21. "Poppies in October",
22. "The Courage of Shutting-Up",
23. "Nick and the Candlestick",
24. "Berck-Plage",
25. "Gulliver",
26. "Getting There",
27. "Medusa",
28. "Purdah",
29. "The Moon and the Yew Tree",
30. "A Birthday Present",
31. "Letter in November",
32. "Amnesiac",
33. "The Rival",
34. "Daddy",
35. "You're",
36. "Fever 103°",
37. "The Bee Meeting",
38. "The Arrival of the Bee Box",
39. "Stings",
40. "The Swarm",
41. "Wintering",
Postscript,
Author's Note,
Acknowledgments and Permissions,
Also by Kate Moses,
Copyright,
Reading Group Guide
Our Book Club Recommendation
With her first novel, Kate Moses has courageously and brilliantly imagined herself into the life of Sylvia Plath, one of the best-known poets of the 20th century. Wintering re-imagines Plath's daily life during the final, creatively explosive year before she took her own life at the age of 30. Reading groups will find Moses' version a thought-provoking journey into the world of poetic genius.
Wintering follows Plath through the months in which she wrote and arranged the incendiary poems that made up her collection Ariel, which was published after her death. Much of the novel takes place just weeks before Plath's suicide in February 1963. Her marriage to poet Ted Hughes is ending, and she is struggling to care for her children on her own. In Moses' portrait, Plath taps into her powerful muse just as her life hits this devastating low, and her poetry grows strong despite her sensations of "the terrible trapdoor of the world swinging loose."
Moses has taken the 41 original poems that Plath chose for Ariel and based each chapter on a poem, following the order the poet originally chose. Her method weaves together Plath's art and life, and will have many groups talking about the relationship between an artist’s biography and her creative output.
The effect is to focus not so much on events themselves but on Plath's seething emotional life, and the creative insights that sprang from this turmoil. Moses is particularly focused on Plath's day-to-day life as a mother of two small children, and the way in which her desperate love for them became an inspiration for her poetry: Another title might have been A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mother.
Readers who have already encountered Plath’s poems from this period will find Wintering full of echoes of Ariel itself, in its metaphors and images: Groups may wish to read these poems alongside Moses’ novel. The author has distilled Plath’s powerful style, and her rendering of flowers and trees, children and houses, bodies and landscapes all vibrate with the same dangerous energy that characterizes Plath's poetry. This novel provides numerous opportunities to discuss that voice, Plath's remarkable verse, and the equally remarkable life that produced it. (Bill Tipper)
An Introduction from the Publisher
Wintering finds Sylvia Plath on her own with her two young children, elated by a move to London and her newly completed poetry manuscript despite the collapse of her marriage to Ted Hughes. Yet within days her resolve is tested. She and her children fall ill. She crosses paths with Ted's lover. And when she gives her poems to Ted to read, she is shaken by his reaction: He is not angry about her vicious mythologizing of their breakup, but stunned into silence by sadness and artistic respect.
Sylvia realizes her poetic triumph has come at a terrible cost. Teetering at the edge of an emotional precipice, she sends Ted on a mission through England's worst snowstorm in decades for items that she has imbued with the totemic power to put things right -- apples, honey, and red curtains left behind at her country home. As Wintering concludes, Sylvia clings to the one thing she believes can save her: hope.
Drawing inspiration from Plath's life and poems, Wintering is a deeply felt novel about artistry, marriage, motherhood, and self-understanding.
Discussion Questions
1. Sylvia Plath's Ariel poems are almost all written from the first person point of view, yet Wintering's narrative is told in the third person. Why do you think the author chose this perspective? What role does perspective play in the novel?
2. Describe Ted Hughes as portrayed in Wintering. Do you think he is fully committed to his marriage to Sylvia? How do you account for his decision to enter into an affair with Assia?
3. In Chapter 29, "The Moon and the Yew Tree", Ted hesitates to tell Sylvia what he really thinks of her poem. What are the consequences of his hesitation, and of Sylvia's refusal to acknowledge the darkness of her world view as she expresses it in her poem? What do Ted and Sylvia's choices in this chapter tell us about each of them, about their marriage, and about the idea of faith?
4. What symbolic role does the ocean play in Sylvia's imagination? How does it relate to her relationship with her mother?
5. What do you think is Sylvia's opinion of herself as a mother? How does Sylvia's longing for fertility -- both as a mother and as an artist -- impact her sense of self as she assembles her Ariel manuscript?
6. The telephone plays an important role -- almost that of a character -- in Wintering. How does the telephone affect Sylvia's sense of personal success and failure, and of "solving the problem of herself"?
7. There are various references to religion in Wintering. For example, Sylvia's voyeuristic desire to attend services at the church next to Court Green in Chapter 29, "The Moon and the Yew Tree"; her belief that "her god is dead, again" in Chapter 15, "Ariel"; her walk through the rainy churchyard in Chapter 12, "Elm"; her recalling of the famous lines about faith, hope and charity from I Corinthians in Chapter 19, "The Other"; her memory of an old Catholic chorale about the Christmas rose in Chapter 40, "The Swarm." What is the author telling us about Sylvia's relationship to organized religion? To faith?
8. The chapter titles in Wintering are taken directly from the poem titles, in Sylvia Plath's intended order, of Ariel and Other Poems. Yet Wintering's chapters do not necessarily refer in overt ways to their poetic counterparts. Think about the chapter titles and what the author might be telling us about Sylvia and her relationship to the story she is constructing through her manuscript. For example, what is the author saying about Chapter 3, "Thalidomide"? Or Chapter 10, "The Jailor"? Or Chapter 30, "A Birthday Present"?
9. In Chapter 1, Sylvia thinks of herself as a "poet at rest." The author tells us that the real Sylvia Plath began writing poetry again at the very end of December 1962, within days of the confrontation at Ted's borrowed apartment depicted in Chapter 40, "The Swarm." What does the novel tell us about why Sylvia would be moved to begin writing poetry again? Do you think the poems written during the last weeks of Sylvia Plath's life came from the same inspiration that produced her artistic output of the fall of 1962?
10. "The ones you love will leave you": this is the statement that Sylvia believes is her intuitive gift of understanding in Chapter 15, "Ariel". How does this relate to the themes of faith and fate that are threaded throughout Wintering? What relationship does it have to Chapter 20, "Stopped Dead," in which the myth of Arachne and Sylvia's viewing of the film "Through a Glass Darkly" are entwined?
11. We are told that the anagram Sylvia imagines at the end of Chapter 40, "The Swarm," tells her "you are ash." How does this symbolic statement relate to Sylvia's defiant independence in Chapter 15, "Ariel", when she rides at sunrise on the morning of her thirtieth birthday?
12. In Chapter 34, "Daddy," Sylvia's father appears only remotely. What is the author telling us about Sylvia Plath's notorious poem?
13. The locations depicted in Wintering are all real, and interestingly, most are on hilltops: Cawsand Hill in Dartmoor, the setting of Sylvia's ride on the horse Ariel; Court Green and its neighboring church and the local playground overlooking the village of North Tawton; Smith College; the Primrose Hill neighborhood in London. In an autobiographical essay the real Plath wrote for the BBC just weeks before her death, she stated that the pride of mountains terrified her, and she found the stillness of hills stifling. What do these hilltop settings, where so many of the most significant events of her life occur, tell us about Sylvia's character?
14. Sylvia Plath has long been considered a feminist icon. Yet Sylvia's relationship to most of the female characters in Wintering -- her mother, Dido Merwin, Assia Wevill, her neighbors in North Tawton and in Primrose Hill -- can be described as conflicted at best. "I so rarely get any girl talk," Sylvia says to Assia while talking in the garden in Chapter 6, "Barren Woman." What do you think of the statement about Wintering made by biographer Diane Middlebrook: "I've never read a more womanly book"? Do you think Sylvia is a feminist?
15. Wintering opens with an image of golden sight and a metaphoric ocean, and ends with a related image of golden sight and another imagined ocean. What is the author telling us with this pair of symbols?
16. One of the themes that runs through Wintering is that of different art forms responding to each other: fiction to poetry, poetry to film, poetry to music, poetry to visual art. How does the fictional aspect of Wintering respond to the poetry that was its inspiration?
17. Sylvia Plath's manuscript for Ariel and Other Poems, which she told Ted Hughes began with the word "love" and ended with the word "spring", has never been published. Now that you know how Sylvia Plath envisioned Ariel, does it change the way you think of Plath as an artist or as a woman? As a mother?
18. The author has chosen not to depict Sylvia's suicide in Wintering, ending the novel a few weeks before her death. Why? Plath biographer Anne Stevenson has written of Wintering that "Everyone who seeks a valid, impartial explanation for Plath's suicide should read this book." Does Wintering aid in your understanding of why the real Sylvia Plath killed herself?
About the Author
Kate Moses is one of the two founding editors of salon.com's "Mothers Who Think" website, and co-editor of the anthology, Mothers Who Think. She lives in San Francisco, California.