On December 10, 1962, Sylvia Plath left her home, Court Green, in rural Devonshire. Accompanied by her two small children and with the help of her temporary nanny, she moved to a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road, the former home of W. B. Yeats in the Primrose Hill district of London. Plath carried with her the poems she had written during the summer and fall of that year, inspired by the collapse of her marriage to Ted Hughes, and some of her earlier poems produced since the publication of her first book, The Colossus, in 1960. In his Introduction to Plath’s Collected Poems, Hughes says that “sometime around Christmas 1962” Plath made a careful selection of forty-one of those poems, arranged them in a specific sequence, and assembled the final manuscript in a black spring-bound binder. It was also around this time that Ted Hughes returned to Court Green to retrieve curtain material and apples at Plath’s request. These actual events lie at the heart of Wintering.

Beyond the invention of the characters’ thoughts and conversations and the fictional particulars attributed to real events otherwise known only in sketchy detail, the most significant departure from the known historical record is the account of the meeting between Plath and Hughes during which Plath saw a new copy of The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works on Hughes’s desk. In the novel this event takes place at the end of December, but it may have taken place about a month later, just days before Plath’s death. It may also have occurred after Ted Hughes left Dido Merwin’s flat on Montagu Square and moved to Soho in London; on these points the various sources conflict. The account of Hughes reading all of Plath’s new poems in chapter 22 also departs from what is positively known: Hughes did read some, probably most, of the Ariel period poems before Plath’s death, but it is not known whether he read them all. There is also no record of Plath speaking on the phone with her mother on December 21, as she is presented doing here.