Although not necessary, a passing knowledge of Sylvia Plath's history and poetry enriches your reading of Kate Moses's
Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath. This fictional account of Sylvia Plath's last months focuses on her hope and heartbreak, as she coped with a disintegrating marriage, weathered the coldest London winter since the eighteenth century, and struggled to raise two children on her own. The forty-one chapters, each named for a poem in Plath's collection
Ariel, follow the order in which Plath intended to publish the poems, rather than the order in which they were published posthumously by Ted Hughes, Plath's estranged husband. As published,
Ariel has been interpreted as a suicide note. The second to the last poem, "Edge," depicts a woman "perfected" in death, with two dead children curled at her sides. The last poem, aptly titled "Words," suggests the last words of someone who believed her death was inevitable: "From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars / Govern a life." As Plath envisioned the collection, however, it would begin with the word "love" from "Morning Song" and end with the word "spring" from "Wintering." Honoring this cycle, Moses frames Plath's struggles in her final months as a triumphant story of a feminine creative vision honed by hope and rebirth.
Moses has done her homework. Her fictional account stems organically from Plath's biography and from her poetry and journals. Defining moments in Plath's history reveal themselves, as they do in "real" life, against the background of quotidian events. Moses shows us Plath painting and sewing and making a new home for herself and her children in London and putting her professional life in order. And since Moses is trying to capture "real" life, she does not vilify Ted Hughes. Relationships are limned in gray, rather than in the black and white of "right" and "wrong." Therefore, she is empathetic. Moving back and forth in time, she reveals not only Hughes's infidelity, but also his love, generosity, and guilty awareness of his culpability.
Because the novel does not always progress chronologically, the ambiguity may frustrate those readers not familiar with Plath's history; others, however, will appreciate the familiar strands threading through the chapters. The language is dense and can be, at times, overwrought. More often, it is beautifully lush and entwined with language from Plath's poetry. Consider, for example, the "Purdah" chapter. It takes place on the solstice, "the veil of the year worn thin," and Sylvia is hanging curtains: "In her hands the curtains rustle; she hangs silks purchased this morning on Princess Road, color stirring pavonine in the lamplight of her bedroom. / Concatenating shifts of gold. Curtained, veiled, screened from the moonless street [...]." Read alongside the poem ("In among these silk / Screens, these rustling appurtenances. / I breathe, and the mouth/ Veil stirs its curtain / My eye / Veil is / A concatenation of rainbows [...]"), the borrowed language and the scene reveal how domesticity, often dismissed as an obstacle to creativity, informs the artistic process.
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