Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath

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.

"Rich and harrowing, told with none of the sensationalism or cheap sentiment that has undermined so many accounts of Plath?s life and end." Kirkus Reviews

"...her novelist's imagination takes us into those crevices of Plath's mind where no one else has ever penetrated." Peter Davison, author of The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston from 1955 to 1960, from Robert Frost to Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath

"Using her poetic vision, Moses evokes a powerful portrait that is typically missing from other works and excels when describing Plath's day-to-day struggles and triumphs." Library Journal

This stunning literary debut captures the haunting last months of Sylvia Plath's life and the painful creation of her legendary Ariel poems. Wintering is a deeply felt novel about artistry, marriage, motherhood, and self-understanding.

This engrossing début novel depicts Sylvia Plaths feverish artistic process in the bitter aftermath of her failed marriage to Ted Hughesthe few excruciating yet astoundingly productive weeks in which she wrote Ariel, her defining last collection of poems.

In December 1962, shortly before her suicide, Plath moved with her two children to London from the Hughess home in Devon. Focusing on the weeks after their arrival, but weaving back through the years of Plaths marriage, Kate Moses imagines the poet juggling the demands of motherhood and muse, shielding her life from her own mother, and by turns cherishing and demonizing her relationship with Ted. Richly imagined yet meticulously faithful to the actual events of Plaths life, Wintering is a remarkable portrait of the moments of bravery and exhilaration that Plath found among the isolation and terror of her depression