Wintering - Kate Moses

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath - This is a fictional biography of Sylvia Plath based on her final collections of poems, published post-humously by her philandering husband, former Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes. Lisa gave me this book years ago and I started it right away. I became fascinated with Plath in high school when I first read The Bell Jar. I then studied her poetry when I was in college. The book is written in a beautiful poetic style, but knowing it would end with Plath's suicide, about half-way through I found that I was too sad to continue reading it. So, I put it on the shelf. Feeling somewhat melancholy myself last week, I picked it back off the shelf and finished it out. This is a difficult read, but Moses has clearly done her research. While a number of the scenes are not grounded in fact, she elegantly captures Plath's mental illness, and her struggle to find happiness and meaning in her family and her work. Plath's death at the age of 30 was a tragic loss of a brilliant writer, and I feel that this novel is a powerful tribute to her work. In the Acknowledgments, Moses thanks Stanford English Professor Diane Middlebrook (in whose class I studied Plath as an undergrad). Middlebrook recently published a non-fiction book called Her Husband: Hughes and Plath: A Marriage, which focuses on the marriage between Plath and Hughes, and the impact her suicide had on his life's work.