I have relied on numerous sources in creating the characters in Wintering and their place in time. Among my primary published sources are The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes; The Bell Jar and Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams by Sylvia Plath; and The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil. I have also relied on biographies of Sylvia Plath by Anne Stevenson, Linda Wagner-Martin, Edward Butscher, Paul Alexander, and Ronald Hayman, as well as Ted Hughes’s essays on Plath collected in Winter Pollen, Hughes’s Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, his early poetry collections, and Birthday Letters. I made extensive use of Letters Home by Sylvia Plath, edited by Aurelia Plath, as well as of Plath’s unpublished correspondence, memorabilia, and prose archived at the Lilly Library at Indiana University and in the Neilson Library, Mortimer Rare Book Room, at Smith College. The unpublished manuscript and drafts of Plath’s Ariel poems and her daily calendar for late 1962, collected at Smith, have been priceless resources. I have also relied on various audio recordings of Sylvia Plath, in particular those in the collection of the National Sound Archive at The British Library.

Among the critical works I have turned to are Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems by Susan Van Dyne, The Other Ariel by Lynda K. Bundtzen, Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath by Judith Kroll, The Other Sylvia Plath by Tracy Brain, Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study by Tim Kendall, Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words by Stephen Gould Axelrod, The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath by Jacqueline Rose, and essay collections edited by Paul Alexander, Gary Lane, Charles Newman, Linda W. Wagner, and Edward Butscher. Two essays that have been key to my understanding of Sylvia Plath have been Marjorie Perloff’s “The Two Ariels: The (Re)Making of the Sylvia Plath Canon” and Catherine Thompson’s uncollected “Dawn Poems in Blood: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems.” Anita Helle’s “Family Matters: An Afterword on the Biography of Sylvia Plath” was my revelatory introduction to Sylvia Plath fifteen years ago and remained acutely relevant during the writing of this book. Access to Diane Middlebrook’s work-in-progress and background research for her book Her Husband was invaluable.