Other secondary works and sources that have significantly informed the pages of Wintering include Robert Graves’s White Goddess, Peter Davison’s The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston, from Robert Frost to Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath, 1955–1960, the poetry and autobiographical prose of W. S. Merwin, Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched with Fire and Night Falls Fast, A. Alvarez’s Savage God, Primrose Hill Remembered by The Friends of the Chalk Farm Library, the Dartmoor National Park Authority Web site, the archive of British Telecom, the Manuscripts Reading Room and Newspaper Library of The British Library, Emily Pollard’s www.plathonline.com, The Book of Apples by Joan Morgan and Alison Richards, The Beekeeper’s Handbook, 3rd edition, by Diana Sammataro and Alphonse Avitabile, and Bumblebees and Their Ways by Otto E. Plath. Details of daily life with babies and small children were gleaned from my own family documents.

My most essential source was Sylvia Plath’s table of contents for the manuscript of her second poetry collection, a list that was published in 1981 within the Notes section in her Collected Poems. The structure of Wintering follows exactly Plath’s original sequence for that manuscript, which was edited by Ted Hughes and published three years after Plath’s death. Though Hughes reordered the poems into a more chronological arrangement and deleted several that Plath had intended for inclusion, he kept the title Plath had typed onto her final title page: Ariel and Other Poems. Wintering, then, takes its ultimate inspiration from the manuscript that Plath arranged with her customary meticulous attention, but a manuscript that has never been published in its intended form.

—Kate Moses

San Francisco, California

July 2002

Acknowledgments and Permissions

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND PERMISSIONS

I am enormously grateful to the following individuals and institutions for their assistance during the writing of Wintering:

Karen Kukil, Associate Curator of the Sylvia Plath Collection at the Mortimer Rare Book Room, Neilson Library, Smith College, provided hours of assistance—at a distance and in person—with painstaking grace. The Lilly Library, Indiana University, provided me with an Everett Helm Visiting Research Fellowship, and the librarians there, particularly Rebecca Cape, came to my timely aid on several occasions. Thanks are also due to the intrepid and generous curators of the National Sound Archive located at The British Library.

The scholars and critics Richard Larschan, Kathleen Connors, Marjorie Perloff, and Anita Helle kindly shared with me their expertise on Plath.

Rosemary Hooley of Skaigh Stables, Belstone, Devonshire, provided me with detailed information about riding practices in Britain and, in particular, northern Dartmoor and its environs.