Wintering (Hardcover)

The book begins at the conclusion of Plath's marriage to poet Ted Hughes. Throughout their tempestuous six years together they shared an extraordinary and mutually productive literary life. They were each other's best critics, and inspired and encouraged the other in their writing careers. The couple had two children, Frieda and Nicholas, still in their infancy when plans for a divorce were made. Their idyllic life together in the English countryside had descended into drama, violence and finally disaster. Hughes left his wife for another woman, a mutual friend, and Plath, in terrible anguish, is left to begin a new life for herself and her babies in a London flat, once occupied by William Butler Yeats.

"Wintering" is set in London in December 1962, with flashbacks to the couple's earlier years. Each of the forty-one chapters takes its title and substance from one of the "Ariel" poems, written during the last four months of the poets life. In spite of the quantity of poetry she pours onto the page, Plath is plagued with reoccurring bouts of clinical depression which she fights desperately. It was bitter cold in London that winter, she and her children were sick with the flu, without a telephone and friends. Having betrayed their marriage Hughes has retreated and is relatively unavailable to call on for help. As Sylvia, weakened with fever, is unable to sleep, her tumultuous mind on fire, she writes her poetry through the night. Dark moods and despair threaten to overcome her in her fragile physical and emotional state. She is left to the mercy of the demons which have pursued her since her breakdown, attempted suicide and hospitalization ten years earlier.

This book is almost as much about language as it is about the last winter Sylvia Plath spends on earth. But then, so much of Ms. Plath's being was about language. To separate the two would have been an injustice. The author succeeds admirably in doing justice to the poet's work and style. "Wintering" is also about pain - palpable, terrible pain.

It is important to note that Kate Moses does not include the suicide in her novel. This is a story of a struggle for life, independence, art and for family. And Plath fought with all the vitality and energy she possessed. Sylvia Plath was a brilliant and prolific poet, a wonderful mother, and she died too young, at age 30. Kate Moses' novel is a near masterpiece. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
JANA

Kate Moses recreates the heart, soul, and psyche of Sylvia Plath in her extraordinary debut novel, Wintering. In preparation for this novel, Moses read virtually every piece of Plath's writing, and most, if not all, of the resource material about Plath. So completely has she distilled this material and incorporated it into the book that the reader feels as if s/he is actually entering the mind of Plath, a Plath who is speaking and reminiscing, conjuring up events, aching, dreaming, and hoping. Astonishingly, Moses achieves this without ever deviating from a third person narrative and without ever speaking as Plath herself.

Organizing the novel around the poems which make up the Ariel collection, all written in the last four months of Plath's life, Moses creates a fictional narrative using as chapter titles the names of poems from Ariel, each chapter including some of the imagery from these poems and the subject matter from Plath's life which parallels them. Moses does this naturally, without calling attention to this specific image in that poem, or this event at such and such a point in Plath's life, simply letting the narrative unfold in parallel with the essence and imagery of the poems, a process which feels, remarkably, as if it's unfolding of its own accord. The poems which serve as the impetus to each chapter live on after forty years, continuing to speak to the reader across time and space, and Moses wisely keeps her own narrative in the present tense, suiting her style to that of Plath's poetry. Like the poems, the chapters sieze on images and events in random order, making Moses's achievement in creating a real and memorable narrative out of the creative chaos truly daunting.

This not really a novel about Plath, so much as it is a novel in which Plath reveals herself, something she does to even greater effect in her poetry. Because of this, I would strongly urge the reader to find a copy of Plath's Ariel to read in concert with Moses's Wintering. Images from the poems take on added significance when they are repeated and expanded in Moses's narrative; likewise, events from the narrative shed light on some of the intense but sometimes unfocused feeling in the poems. When one knows about the lives of Plath and Ted Hughes and can see the significance in their lives of the repeating images of bees, apples, the moon, food, the earth, and life cycles, their symbolic importance in both the poems and narrative grows, and the reader gains new insights. This is a remarkable novel based on the life and poetry of Sylvia Plath, one which will undoubtedly bring new readers and new appreciation to Plath on the fortieth anniversary of her death at age thirty. Mary Whipple

I couldn't recommend it, but I didn't give up on it either.