‘I want my career, my children and a free supple life’: Sylvia Plath’s radical reinvention
Too often framed as a tragic icon or a victim of domesticity, the poet remade herself and her work at the start of the 60s, as a new collection will show
In February 1962, Sylvia Plath dropped in on her neighbour in Devon, Rose Key, with “a plate of absolutely indigestible Black Walnut-flavored cupcakes”. She had made them from a Betty Crocker mix palmed off on her by the bank manager’s wife. Not wanting to waste it nor feed it to her own family (she was scornful of both processed food and the British appetite for starch), Plath baked it and efficiently dispatched it next door.
There was a lot of cake-baking involved in the social life of North Tawton. Plath excelled at it – like everything else. In the early months of that year, shortly after giving birth to her second child, she was not only making her own “six-egg” sponges, she was taking Italian, German and French lessons, writing an experimental poem for the BBC Third programme (Three Women), obsessively sourcing rugs for her new house (“I have looked & looked at carpets, in Exeter, London & Plymouth, & feel now that our choice is right & sensible”), having the downstairs floors cemented (she hated dirty floors) and expressing a desire to begin woodwork classes.