A lioness in winter

One of the things your character Sylvia believes is that her husband is trying to thwart her artistically.

In Plath's own statements about that, she goes back and forth. He's the greatest support she could ever have and yet three days later she's grumbling about the fact that it's all about him. I think that's totally normal in any relationship, to have that kind of sway back and forth between your feelings of being supported and your feelings of being thwarted. They were both extremely ambitious artists working in the same form. I wonder if Plath was also constrained by wanting Ted to achieve fame before she did because that was more fitting and ladylike, for the husband to get the acclaim and then later in life the wife would follow. Her journals, letters and poetry in some ways back that up, but she also wanted to be the arrow, she wrote, "I am the arrow." I am the arrow, not him.

You could speculate that when she got to the point of recognizing how successful she was becoming artistically -- and I mean "successful" from a very personal standpoint, not a public standpoint -- when she was writing the "Ariel" poems, that would wash up a lot of conflicting emotions. One was "He's already gotten famous and the BBC loves him and everything he does seems to turn to gold," whereas she's still struggling for a readership while knowing that her work is truly exceptional. I can't imagine that she wouldn't have felt some rivalry and frustration at not garnering the same level of attention that he was getting. And, frankly, Ted Hughes, because he lived until he was nearly 70, had the opportunity to publish quite a bit more than Plath ever did. Still, I can't imagine anyone putting Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath together in the same category as far as their literary legacy goes. She's clearly in another category. Other people might argue that she only had this one great book, so how can you judge her as a more successful poet than Ted Hughes, who had an entire body of work.

Is it possible that she held back her own full ability while she was married and the breakup did truly liberate her?

I think that's a very interesting possibility. I believe something pretty similar to that. I do think that there was something in Sylvia Plath that required a sense of endangerment and loss in order to really get to the heart of who she was personally as well as artistically. She needed to push things to an extreme in order to get there artistically.

I think of her as being one of the great poets of rage. She needed something big enough to justify and provoke that rage.

Yeah, because you really can't write a great rage poem over the post office not getting you your telephone.

In the way you depict her at the point in her life where she has everything she wants -- her family in the farmhouse and it's springtime -- there's a kind of disorientation. That happiness, that kind of fulfillment was not a state she felt totally comfortable in.

That's one of the sad things. Plath desperately wanted that blissful existence, and yet it did not fulfill her artistically to be in that state. Some of the poems she wrote about motherhood some could argue are blissful poems, but they're not really. They're far more profound and complicated than that. There's a deep happiness -- actually, "satisfaction" is a better word -- but it's not coming from a happy place. It's far more intellectual than that. I think you're right. I think that she was like one of those friends we all have who needs to stir up trouble, who always has a crisis brewing. She was more that personality than not.

There's a story that's repeated in one of the Plath biographies about her going to a party late in '62 after the breakup with Hughes and talking to another writer friend who says something about having trouble getting his work going and that he had to create problems for himself in order to make it happen. Her response was, "I know exactly what you mean because I conjured Assia." At least in that one moment she copped to the idea that she might have choreographed her own crisis to get to a deeper place artistically.

Or she could've just been telling herself that because it was too frightening to admit that something so beyond her control could have destroyed her life.

Yes, that way she was exerting some ownership and control of the situation that otherwise she was adrift in.

Her marriage affected her work in one way, but motherhood was perhaps an even greater factor. That seems to be a particularly important theme to you. Work and motherhood are usually presented as conflicting forces in women's lives, but that's not how you choose to frame it.

That was one of her greatest fears. She wanted motherhood and wanted to have the sense of sweeping fertility in her life. She wanted to be a mother and a wife and an artist. It's that quote -- "books and babies and beef stew" -- she has in one of her journals that has always stuck with me. She wanted all those things at once.

What is fascinating about her is that motherhood seems to have been the galvanizing force for her as an artist. Her most powerful work came after the birth of her children. With both of her children, within a couple of months or so of their births she started writing poems that had evolved to an entirely new and higher plane. It turned out to be the opposite of what she feared. Motherhood gave her the material or maybe the access to the material that she had always needed and had not yet been able to get out of herself.

In listening to recordings of her reading, it's interesting to hear the ones she did in the late '50s, before she had children. There's a determination and a sense of earnestness in her reading voice, but it's also very girlish and there's a certain reticence. You can think of her as a girl poet. In the recordings after she's had children, especially the recordings made in October 1962, historic recordings of some of her late poems -- some of which she'd literally written that morning -- it is amazing to hear the resonance of her voice.

It's as if she has suddenly embodied a new kind of gravitas and confidence. From poem to poem she will take on the cloak of a different character or emotional temperature that is so much more nuanced than the voice we hear from her earlier on. I do think that motherhood had a lot to do with that. It grounded her in a way that she hadn't anticipated before it happened and then afterward it was such a natural part of herself. She wrote several times to her friends and to her mother that her real life began after she had children and everything really flowed from that.

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