This chronology outlines all correspondences between the facts of Sylvia Plath’s life and the creation of her Ariel manuscript, and the fictional events depicted in Wintering. An abridged version of this chronology can be found in the paperback edition of Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath (Anchor Books, October 2003). I thank Eilat Negev and Yehuda Koren for the use of their original research regarding the September 1962 trip to Ireland taken by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

October 27, 1932: Sylvia Plath is born in Boston, Massachusetts to Aurelia Schober Plath, daughter of German immigrants, and Otto Emil Plath, a German-born professor of German language and biology at Boston University.

1933: Otto Plath invited to write a chapter on "Insect Societies" for A Handbook on Social Psychology (Clark University Press, 1935). Aurelia Plath, as her husband’s assistant, researches and writes the first draft; the family dining room is used as the work space.

1934: Otto Plath publishes his doctoral thesis in book form as Bumblebees and Their Ways (Macmillan Company).

April 27, 1935: Warren Plath, Sylvia’s brother, born. To manage her daughter’s sibling rivalry, Aurelia Plath encourages Sylvia to pick out capital letters from newspapers spread on the floor during Warren’s feedings.

July 1935: Sylvia Plath reads a stop sign as "POTS" at the age of two years and nine months.

Fall 1936: The Plath family moves from an apartment in Jamaica Plain, a Boston suburb, to Winthrop, Massachusetts, a beach community across the bay from Boston and close to the seaside home of Aurelia’s parents in Point Shirley. Though increasingly weakened by chronic ill health, Otto Plath refuses to consult a doctor.

1937: Seven-year-old Ted Hughes, son of a Yorkshire tobacconist and his wife, has had a dreamlike life apprenticed to his decade-older brother, Gerald, who teaches him to fish and hunt and incorporate the natural world into his imagination. When the Hughes family moves from rural Mytholmroyd in the Yorkshire Pennines to the industrial town of Mexborough, and Gerald takes a job as a gamekeeper in Devon, later moving to Australia, Ted’s idyllic boyhood is irrevocably changed.

Summer 1937: To the amazement of four-year-old Sylvia Plath, Otto Plath catches a drone bee, which has no stinger, in his cupped hands.

Fall 1937: Already reading simple sentences and stories, Sylvia Plath asks Aurelia to send her to school. Just short of her fifth birthday Sylvia is enrolled in first grade at The Sunshine School in Winthrop.

Winter 1938-1939: With Otto Plath’s health deterioriating and Warren Plath chronically ill with allergies and respiratory ailments, Sylvia is frequently cared for by her maternal grandparents, Frank and Aurelia Schober, in Point Shirley.

August 1940: Otto Plath is diagnosed with an advanced case of diabetes after a stubbed toe becomes gangrenous, and is in and out of hospital through the fall. Warren is cared for by Aurelia’s parents in Point Shirley, but Sylvia stays at home with Aurelia and Otto, attending to her father by bringing him cold drinks and making drawings while wearing a nurse’s uniform cut down to her size.

October 12, 1940: Otto Plath, gravely ill with complications from diabetes, undergoes amputation of his gangrenous left leg at the thigh.

November 5, 1940: Otto Plath dies in his sleep from a embolism one week after Sylvia’s 8th birthday. Sylvia insists on going to school that day, but returns with a contract for her mother stating "I PROMISE NEVER TO MARRY AGAIN. Signed: ________."

January 1941: With the practical support of her parents, who had rented their home at Point Shirley and moved into the Plath home in Winthrop following Otto’s death, Aurelia Plath goes back to work as a teacher and accountant, often holding two or three temporary jobs simultaneously while also suffering from a duodenal ulcer developed during the final two years of Otto Plath’s illness.

August 11, 1941: Sylvia Plath, who has been writing poetry since the age of five, is published for the first time at the age of eight in the children’s section of the Boston Herald.

Fall 1942: Aurelia Plath begins a full-time teaching appointment at Boston University. After selling the house in Winthrop, the Plath family (Aurelia, Sylvia and Warren as well as the Schobers ) moves inland to a modest, three-bedroom house in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Aurelia and Sylvia Plath begin sharing a bedroom shortly after Sylvia’s tenth birthday. Though Sylvia is a straight-A student, Aurelia chooses to have Sylvia repeat fifth grade to lessen the age gap with her new schoolmates in Wellesley. Over the course of the school year Sylvia displays her now typical, enthusiastic over-achievement: she writes forty book reports for her own enjoyment.

Christmas 1943: Aurelia Plath gives Sylvia her first diary. Sylvia continues to keep a diary or journal for the rest of her life.

February 1943: Aurelia Plath suffers an acute gastric hemorrhage, the first of many, for which she is hospitalized for nearly a month.

Summer 1943: No longer spending her summers at the beach, Sylvia Plath spends many afternoons reading and writing in a backyard apple tree in Wellesley.

January 20, 1945: Aurelia Plath takes Sylvia and Warren to Boston to see their first play, a Colonial Theatre production of The Tempest by William Shakespeare.

Spring 1945: Sylvia Plath receives her first academic award, the Alice L. Phillips Junior High seventh grade "Wellesley Award," including a copy of Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb.

Spring 1947: Sylvia Plath completes junior high with numerous honors, including commendations for punctuality and excellent grades, an achievement certificate for winning first place in a national art contest, a commendation for being the only student in school’s history to win a sixth school letter, and a copy of Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry for being a "special student."

September 1947: Sylvia Plath enters Gamaliel Bradford High School in Wellesley, where she becomes the student of exemplary English teacher Wilbury Crockett, who inspires Sylvia’s development as a serious writer and encourages her submission of poems, stories and essays to national publications.

1948: Ted Hughes, an aspiring writer, delays his entrance to Pembroke College, Cambridge to serve two years of National Service as a radio mechanic in the Royal Air Force, giving him the opportunity to read and reread the complete works of Shakespeare.

June 7, 1950: Despite a frenetic social life, Sylvia Plath graduates first in her high school class, a member of the National Honor Society, and coeditor of the school newspaper as well as winner of a prestigious, full-ride Town Scholarship to Wellesley College. Awarded significant funds from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts --- including a scholarship sponsored by novelist Mrs. Olive Higgins Prouty, author of Now, Voyager and Stella Dallas --- Sylvia elects to enroll at Smith.

August 1950: After receiving forty-five rejections for stories submitted to Seventeen magazine, Sylvia Plath is published in Seventeen, her national publication of fiction. Sylvia’s first poem to appear in a national publication is published in the Christian Science Monitor.

September, 1950: Sylvia begins study as a freshman at Smith College, living first in Haven House, a dormitory for students receiving financial aid. Sylvia’s first essay in a national publication is published in the Christian Science Monitor. During her first two years of college Plath is published several more times in national magazines. Still an exceptional student, throughout her years at Smith she suffers from periodic bouts of panicked anxiety, sleeplessness, and respiratory frailty.

November 1950: After a poem by Sylvia Plath is published in Seventeen, she discovers it posted on a college bulletin board reserved for Smith students in the news.

January 1951: The first feature story on Sylvia Plath to appear in print is posted on the college bulletin board reserved for Smith students in the news.

Spring 1951: Sylvia Plath begins to date Dick Norton, an old Wellesley friend who would attend medical school during his relationship with her. Among Sylvia’s many boyfriends, infatuations and lovers from college until her marriage to Ted Hughes, Norton is notable as the model for The Bell Jar’s Buddy Willard, the fictional embodiment of Plath’s sense of sexual inequity and betrayal and her fear/fascination with the medical world.

May 1951: A short story by Sylvia Plath is chosen third-place winner of Seventeen’s annual fiction competition.

May 1952: A short story by Sylvia Plath wins honorable mention in Seventeen’s annual fiction competition.

August 1952: Sylvia Plath wins first place in Mademoiselle magazine’s college fiction contest. Plath receives a laudatory letter from the editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf, urging her to write a novel for Knopf.

October 1952: Sylvia Plath is awarded second prize in Seventeen’s fiction competition. Plath’s many extracurricular activities, exhausting social life at college, and her internal pressure to succeed begin to take a more profound toll on her psychological, as well as her physical, health.

Fall 1952-Spring 1953: Sylvia Plath continues to balance academic, social and literary successes (juggling various boyfriends, named editor-in-chief of Smith Review for her senior year and a paid journalist with Press Board, awarded college prizes for her poetry; her accomplishments written about in various publications, and more stories, essays and poems published in Seventeen, Mademoiselle, and Harper’s) with increasingly emotionally-magnified failures, including rejections from the New Yorker, a broken leg, frustration over the sexual double standard, and the end of her fraught romance with Dick Norton. Plath applies for a spot in Frank O’Hara’s fiction workshop at Harvard Summer School. In April, Plath is awarded a prestigious Mademoiselle Magazine College Board guest editorship.

June, 1953: Sylvia Plath spends an exhausting, disillusioning month in Manhattan as the Guest Managing Editor for Mademoiselle, an experience she later fictionalizes in The Bell Jar.

July 1953: Sylvia Plath’s mental health breaks down upon her return from the Mademoiselle guest editorship and learning that she has not been accepted to Frank O’Hara’s Harvard workshop: she is suicidal, unable to read or write. After several consultations with a Wellesley psychiatrist, Aurelia Plath agrees to a series of electroshock therapy treatments for Sylvia.

August 1953: Sylvia Plath undergoes outpatient electroshock therapy treatments administered with no anesthesia, support or counseling, all of which were considered standard medical practice for EST treatment at the time. She becomes increasingly depressed and suicidal, suffering from acute insomnia during the entire month. Aurelia Plath secures all knives and sleeping pills in a metal lock box stored in the bedroom she shares with her daughter.

August 24-26, 1953: Sylvia Plath breaks into her mother’s supply of sleeping pills, leaves a note for her family saying she’s gone for a long walk, and attempts suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills, hiding herself in a crawl space reached through the cellar of her mother’s house in Wellesley. Plath’s disappearance makes front-page news in local papers, including the Boston Globe. She is found after three days, moaning and unconscious, with an infected gash on her right cheek where she apparently bashed her face against the house’s concrete foundation. After initial treatment at Newton-Wellesley Hospital, she is transferred to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston for psychiatric evaluation.

September 14, 1953: With the financial sponsorship of her Smith benefactor, Olive Higgins Prouty, Plath is moved to McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, where she begins psychiatric treatment with Dr. Ruth Barnhouse Beuscher.

Fall 1953: Teacher Wilbury Crockett, one of the few people permitted to see Sylvia Plath while she was hospitalized at McLean, brings the "Anagram" word game on his regular visits and works patiently with Plath to rebuild her relationship with written language. Aurelia Plath, living at the home of Mrs. Prouty to be nearer her daughter at McLean, suffers numerous ulcerous hemorrhages as a result of anxiety over her daughter’s future.

December 1953: Sylvia Plath receives carefully supervised electroshock therapy with Dr. Beuscher. Plath is prescribed birth control by Dr. Buescher, and on one of several sanctioned outings from McLean, loses her virginity.

January 1954: After a dramatic recovery from depression following electroshock therapy, Sylvia Plath returns to Smith College as a Special Student, taking a light load of courses and living in a single room in Lawrence House, another dormitory for scholarship students. As Sylvia Plath’s financial aid monies for the year had been diverted elsewhere by Smith, Aurelia Plath cashes an insurance policy to finance her daughter’s return to college.

Spring 1954: Sylvia Plath’s record of academic, social and literary successes continues. She is awarded Smith’s largest scholarship for the following year and a scholarship to Harvard Summer School; continues to publish poetry in Harper’s and the Smith Review; is elected president of Alpha Kappa Psi; and begins a relationship with Richard Sassoon, a sophisticated, European-born Yale undergraduate and cousin of the British poet Siegfried Sassoon.

Summer 1954: Ted Hughes graduates Pembroke College, Cambridge and spends the following year and a half lingering among his Cambridge friends and holding odd jobs in London, including that of a rose gardener, night watchman, and washing dishes in the cafeteria at the London Zoo.

Fall 1954: Sylvia Plath works on her senior thesis, entitled "The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky’s Novels", which explores the idea of the dual identity. Plath also interviews for various graduate fellowships, including a Fulbright Scholarship. Her third poem published in Harper’s inspires an article on her in the Wellesley Townsman.

Spring 1955: While Aurelia Plath is in hospital preparing for a subtotal gastrectomy to remove most of her stomach, Sylvia calls to cheer her mother with the news that she has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study literature at Cambridge University.

June 6, 1955: Sylvia Plath graduates from Smith with an astounding array of academic and literary honors, among them the Academy of American Poets Prize and first place in the Glascock poetry contest, for which she is featured in the Christian Science Monitor with judge Marianne Moore. She has had recent publications and acceptances from The Atlantic Monthly, Mademoiselle, and Vogue, is elected to Phi Beta Kappa, graduates summa cum laude, and is chosen Smith’s outstanding student in English. Aurelia Plath is released from hospital to attend her daughter’s graduation, to which she is driven by a friend while laying on a mattress in the back of a car. Commencement speaker Adlai Stevenson’s advice to the graduates is that succeeding in a "creative marriage" will be their greatest achievement.

October 1955: Sylvia arrives at Newnham College, Cambridge to begin a year of study on her Fulbright Scholarship.

December 12, 1955: Sylvia Plath loses control of her hired horse while riding in Cambridge, which she later recalls in the poem "Ariel."

February 25, 1956: Sylvia meets Ted Hughes, a recent graduate of King’s College, Cambridge, at a party celebrating the first issue of the St. Botolph’s Review, in which Hughes’ poems are published. Their notorious first meeting ends with Hughes kissing Plath and snatching her hair band and earrings, and Plath retaliating by biting Hughes on the cheek.

March 1956: Sylvia Plath’s Fulbright grant is extended for a second year, through June 1957. While Plath plans her spring break to Paris, Italy and Germany (and her rendezvous with Richard Sassoon and another American boyfriend during the trip), she and Ted Hughes concoct various social plans to satisfy their curiosity about one another. Plath accepts an invitation from a friend of Hughes’s, Luke Myers, who invites her to have a drink with Hughes and himself in London prior to her trip to France.

March 23, 1956: Sylvia Plath, Luke Myers and Ted Hughes meet at 18 Rugby Street in London. Plath and Hughes spend the night together. Upon her arrival in Paris the following day, having traveled by car and ferry with fellow Fulbright scholars, Plath notes in her journal the bruises on her neck from her first night of lovemaking with Hughes.

April 13, 1956: After receiving an ardent letter from Hughes, Plath returns to him in London. Hughes follows Plath back to Cambridge for the spring term. During their courtship, Plath and Hughes often read to each other from Hughes’ cherished copy of the collected Oxford Shakespeare.

April 29, 1956: Aurelia Schober, Sylvia Plath’s maternal grandmother, dies.

June 16 — September 1956: Aurelia Plath, in England on a long-planned trip to visit her daughter, is the only guest at the sudden marriage of Sylvia and Ted Hughes at the Church of St. George the Martyr in London on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Fearing the possibility that Plath could lose her Fulbright scholarship, she and Hughes agree to keep the marriage secret until the end of the Cambridge term in June 1957. After the wedding Plath and Hughes honeymoon in Paris for two weeks before travelling to Benidorm, Spain, where they begin in earnest their practice of writing in tandem, often reusing the back sides of manuscript drafts of each other’s work. In late August they travel to Heptonstall, Yorkshire, to spend the month of September with Hughes’ family. While in Yorkshire, Plath begins to actively cultivate publication for herself and Hughes, who is far less savvy than she about publishing.

October 1, 1956: Sylvia Plath returns to Cambridge alone, keeping her marriage a secret. Hughes remains in Yorkshire. Plath receives acceptances for stories and poems in The Atlantic Monthly, Granta, and The Christian S cience Monitor, and Hughes receives an acceptance from The Nation. Hughes is invited to record a program on William Butler Yeats for the BBC in London. Suffering from her separation from Hughes, Plath reveals her marriage to Newnham and Fulbright officials, who unexpectedly offer their congratulations.

November 1956: Plath and Hughes rent a flat at 55 Eltisley Avenue in Cambridge. Hughes receives acceptances from Poetry and The Atlantic Monthly, and Plath submits his poetry manuscript, The Hawk in the Rain, to the 92^nd Street Y Poetry Center’s first-book contest judged by Marianne Moore, Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden, the winner of which will be published by Harper & Brothers. Plath also submits her own poetry manuscript to the Yale Younger Poets series and inquires about teaching jobs at Smith College for the following year.

February 23, 1957: After a month in which Sylvia Plath has six poems published in Poetry, another in The Atlantic Monthly, and a short story in Granta, Ted Hughes receives a telegram congratulating him for winning the 92^nd Street Y Poetry Center contest for The Hawk in the Rain. Plath writes to her mother that she is happier than if her own book were to be published, and that she is glad that Ted’s book is the first to be accepted.

Spring 1957: Plath and Hughes have their first professional publications in England with poems accepted by The London Magazine. Plath is offered a job on the Smith College English department faculty for the 1957-58 school year and learns, while completing her Newnham final examinations, that her poetry manuscript has reached the final selection round of the Yale competition. Faber & Faber accepts The Hawk in the Rain for British publication. Plath and Hughes spend their first wedding anniversary in Yorkshire before sailing to the United States in June.

Summer 1957: Following a wedding reception at her mother’s home in Wellesley, Plath and Hughes spend seven weeks on Cape Cod. Hughes continues to amass publications and honors on both sides of the Atlantic, including The Spectator, The Nation, Poetry, Harper’s, the Times Literary Supplement, and, finally, The New Yorker, which will publish his signature poem "The Thought-Fox." Just prior to starting her teaching job at Smith, Plath learns that her poetry manuscript has not been selected by the Yale series.

September 1957: Plath and Hughes move to 337 Elm Street in Northampton, and Plath begins teaching freshman English courses, almost immediately finding herself intimidated by her position and sick with panic. While she meets with a few literary successes, including Poetry magazine’s annual Bess Hokin Prize, Plath’s literary accomplishments dwindle to almost nothing for the year while she teaches at Smith. Plath and Hughes begin the practice of inspiring Plath’s poetic output with "exercises" in which Hughes offers Plath specific subjects for poems. The Hawk in the Rain is published in both England and the U.S. to resounding critical acclaim, including a glowing endorsement from W. S. Merwin in The New York Times Book Review. After their initial meeting, Merwin and Hughes develop an enduring friendship.

December 1957: W. S. Merwin and his wife, Dido, encourage Plath and Hughes to consider giving up academia to live as freelance writers. Plath’s health breaks down with the stress of teaching and her writer’s block; she is diagnosed with pneumonia and physical exhaustion. Aurelia Plath is operated on again for complications from her gastric ulcers. Continuing to gather literary accolades, including additional acceptances from The New Yorker and a children’s story published by Jack and Jill, Hughes is offered a position teaching English and creative writing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for the spring term.

Spring 1958: Recently settled on her decision, made jointly with Hughes, to leave their teaching positions at the end of the term and live for a year in Boston as full-time writers, Plath has a sudden burst of creative freedom during Smith’s spring break, writing eight poems in eight days, inspired, first, by other works of art, and increasingly by emotional loss, including memories of her seaside childhood and of her father’s death. Toward the end of the school term, Plath writes in her journal of several incidents in which her sense of jealousy and disillusionment are aroused by Hughes, including an argument that ends comically in a nearby park after nightfall, with Plath hiding behind trees as Hughes stares fiercely into the waggling branches.

Summer 1958: Despite Aurelia Plath’s disappointment in her daughter and son-in-law’s decision to give up the financial security of their teaching positions, Sylvia Plath’s resolve is galvanized by several acceptances from magazines, most notably the acceptance of two poems by The New Yorker, the fees for which amount to three months’ rent on a Boston apartment.

Fall 1958: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes move to 9 Willow Street in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood. Immediately upon their arrival in Boston, Hughes wins the lucrative Guinness Poetry Prize. Writing and publishing only sporadically and made anxious by the lack of routine in her life, Plath takes a job as a part-time secretary at Massachusetts General Hospital’s psychiatric clinic, giving her both an excuse for not writing and raw subject material for short stories and poems.

December 1958: Sylvia Plath reinitiates private psychoanalysis with Dr. Beuscher, delving deeply into her relationship with her mother, her ownership of her writing, and her equating of love with accomplishment. She writes in her journal regarding her reading of Sigmund Freud’s "Mourning and Melancholia," her sexual and daughterly guilt, her grief over not feeling unconditionally loved, and her mother’s dream of Otto Plath killing himself because of his daughter’s promiscuity.

December 27, 1958: In her journal, Plath records a particularly satisfying sexual encounter with Hughes and reading, with Hughes, King Lear over tea.

December 31, 1958: Sylvia Plath writes in her journal of her dissatisfaction with her writing and her procrastinating, and that she is reading the autobiography of St. Thérèse. She notes her reluctance to assemble a Little Red Riding Hood costume for a New Year’s Eve party though Hughes had spent an afternoon and evening fashioning a wolf-mask for his own costume.

Spring 1959: Sylvia Plath audits a poetry seminar taught by Robert Lowell at Boston University; she and Hughes socialize with Lowell and his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, as well as many local writers and literary figures, including Anne Sexton. Hughes is granted a Guggenheim fellowship, and together he and Plath are invited to spend the fall at Yaddo, an artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Plath and Hughes continue to be published in magazines and amass savings with which they will finance their move back to England at the end of the year, but Plath’s poetry manuscript again narrowly misses publication in the Yale series. After hoping for several months to become pregnant, Plath begins to despair that she is barren, her desire for creative and personal fertility a hopeless wish amounting to nothing more than, as she states in her journal, "ash."

July-August 1959: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes embark on a car camping trip across the North America, including upstate New York and Ontario, Canada; Yellowstone National Park; Utah’s Great Salt Lake; the coast of California; the Mohave Desert; the Grand Canyon; and Texas, New Orleans, and the southeastern states. During the trip Plath realizes that she is pregnant.

September-November 1959: While at Yaddo, Ted Hughes completes the last of the poems he will include in his second poetry collection, Lupercal. Plath undergoes a creative breakthrough with the writing of several poems, all of which are marked by the relaxing of her resistance to subjectivity. After seeing poems of Plath’s in London Magazine, James Michie of London’s William Heinemann Publishers invites Plath to submit a manuscript of her poetry.

December 1959-January 1960: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes return to England on the Queen Elizabeth II and spend Christmas with the Hughes family in Yorkshire. After they househunt in London for two weeks, Dido Merwin alerts them to a small, one bedroom flat on Chalcot Square in Primrose Hill, close to her own doctor, to whom she recommends Plath as a patient. Plath and Hughes take the flat on a three-year lease.

February 1, 1960: Sylvia Plath, now seven months pregnant, and Ted Hughes move into their flat at 3 Chalcot Square, which, save for a new six-foot-long bed, an American-style refrigerator and a reconditioned stove, is furnished largely from the Merwin’s attic. Plath and Hughes work diligently to finish painting, building bookcases, wallpapering and organizing their flat before the birth of their baby. Hughes sets up a small work table (borrowed from the Merwin’s attic) in the red-painted vestibule; Plath’s work space, when she gets back to writing after giving birth, is a table under the window in the small parlor.

February 10, 1960: Sylvia Plath signs the contract for publication of her first book, The Colossus and Other Poems by William Heinemann.

March 1960: Ted Hughes’ Hawk in the Rain is selected for the W. Somerset Maugham Award, which includes a generous stipend for foreign travel. Hughes’ second poetry collection, Lupercal, is published and wins immediate critical acclaim. His first children’s book, Meet My Folks!, is under contract with Faber & Faber, and he is recording for and receiving regular commissions from the BBC. Plath is publishing poetry and occasional short stories in various magazines and newspapers in the U.S. and England; in a feature review of Lupercal and Hughes in the Observer, Sylvia is described as "a New Yorker poet in her own right."

April 1, 1960: Frieda Rebecca Hughes is born at 3 Chalcot Square with a midwife in attendance, the delivery so rapid that there is no time for anesthesia. Plath and Hughes begin the practice of sharing childcare, which continues throughout their marriage.

May 1960: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes have dinner at the home of T. S. Eliot. Hughes begins to write in W. S. Merwin’s borrowed study on St. George’s Terrace.

June 1960: Lupercal goes into a second printing, and Ted Hughes, whose literary reputation continues to flourish, increasingly receives invitations, commissions, and requests. At a party for W. H. Auden given by Faber & Faber, Hughes is photographed among the publisher’s "literary lions": T. S. Eliot, Louis MacNiece, Stephen Spender and Auden. Plath begins to write again after the first intense months of early motherhood, occupying W. S. Merwin’s borrowed study in the mornings, trading with Hughes in the afternoons. While strolling with Frieda at the end of the month, Plath happens across a freehold for sale on Fitzroy Road, Yeats’ street, though she and Hughes are not yet in the position to buy a house.

July 1960: The House of Aries, the first of Ted Hughes’ plays to be produced by the BBC, is accepted.

August 1960: Lupercal is published in the U.S. by Harper & Brothers and receives outstanding reviews. Plath is turned down for a third time by the Yale Younger Poets series. While vacationing in Yorkshire, Plath and Hughes visit the seaside town of Whitby, which Plath later compares unfavorably to the beaches of Cape Cod during an April 1962 interview with the BBC.

October, 1960: Plath’s first book, the poetry collection The Colossus, is published in England by William Heinemann Ltd. The Colossus receives only a handful of (sometimes equivocal) reviews, which trickle in over several months. The BBC, which had previously turned down her work, accepts two poems for broadcast.

Oct. 16-17, 1960: Sylvia Plath writes "Magi"

December 1960: Sylvia Plath, newly pregnant for the second time, and Ted Hughes spend the Christmas holidays in Heptonstall with the Hughes family. After an argument with Hughes’s sister, Olwyn, Plath and Hughes, with Frieda, return early to London.

January 1961: Sylvia Plath suffers from viral illnesses and a chronically troublesome appendix that would soon require surgery. Plath takes a part-time job with The Bookseller, and The Critical Quarterly commissions her to edit a supplement on American poetry. Dido Merwin’s face-lift becomes the subject of a poem by Plath. European travel on Hughes’s Maugham award is being planned around the summer arrival of a second child.

January 31, 1961: The BBC radio program "Two of a Kind," which features interviews with married couples working in the same field, airs a show with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes entitled "Poets in Partnership," prompting a flurry of fan mail for Plath and Hughes.

February 1-6, 1961: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes attend a party for Theodore Roethke. Hughes is at work on a five-act play entitled The Calm, described by Plath as a "dark opposite" to Shakespeare’s Tempest. During this same week, Plath answers a phone call from a female producer at the BBC, Moira Doolan, who invites Hughes to attend a meeting about his projects. When Hughes is late returning from the meeting, Plath destroys the papers on his hallway desk, including original manuscripts and his Oxford Shakespeare. Plath begins to miscarry over the weekend, finally losing the pregnancy on Monday, February 6.

Feb. 19, 1961: Sylvia Plath writes "Morning Song."

Feb. 21, 1961: Sylvia Plath writes "Barren Woman."

February 26 — March 8, 1961: Sylvia Plath checks into St. Pancras Hospital, London, for an appendectomy. While Sylvia awaits surgery, Ted Hughes arrives with a first-reading contract from the New Yorker, giving Plath an annual stipend and additional fees in return for allowing the magazine first consideration for the publication of her poetry. Plath is released from hospital to continue her recovery at home on March 8.

March 18, 1961: Sylvia Plath writes "Tulips."

Late March 1961: Ted Hughes wins the Hawthornden Prize for Lupercal. Alfred A. Knopf offers to publish The Colossus in the U.S. Plath has begun to write the manuscript of The Bell Jar, working seven days a week in W. S. Merwin’s borrowed study.

April 1961: Ted Hughes’ first children’s book, Meet My Folks!, is published by Faber and Faber.

May 1961: Sylvia Plath becomes pregnant for the third time.

June 19, 1961: Aurelia Plath arrives in England for a long-scheduled visit to her daughter and Ted Hughes, and to meet her granddaughter.

July 1-14, 1961: While Aurelia Plath cares for Frieda in London, a pregnant Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes vacation in France, crossing by channel ferry and driving their new Morris Traveller station wagon to Berck-Plage, Finisterre, Rouen, and Mont St. Michel on their way to visit W. S. and Dido Merwin in Lacan de Loubressac, overlooking the Dordogne. Dido Merwin becomes the model for Plath’s poem, "The Rival." Upon their return Plath and Hughes find and purchase Court Green, an 11^th century Devonshire manor house with three acres of outbuildings and grounds, including an apple orchard of 72 trees and a moated, prehistoric hill fort with a huge, three-trunked wych elm at its base.

August, 1961: Aurelia Plath returns to the U.S. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes transfer the lease on their Chalcot Square flat to a young poet, David Wevill, and his wife, Assia, who works in advertising, offering the flat to them despite having taken a deposit from another applicant. Plath and Hughes entertain the Wevills for dinner at Chalcot Square once before moving to Court Green.

August 22, 1961: Sylvia Plath completes the manuscript for The Bell Jar. During the same week Plath wins first prize in the Cheltenham Poetry Festival. Plath purchases an old-fashioned, hand-crank Singer sewing machine in London just prior to moving to Court Green.

August 30, 1961: The Hughes family moves to Court Green in the village of North Tawton, a few miles north of Dartmoor, bringing with them a large round dining table belonging to Assia Wevill that they have agreed to "store." With walls three feet thick, floors of pitch cobble, a thatched roof, and nine rooms as well as an attic and wine cellar, Court Green is large and picturesque if run down and lacking in central heating. Ted Hughes takes the attic for his study. Plath takes an upstairs bedroom with a view of the neighboring church, its property line picket of gravestones, and a churchyard yew tree.

Fall 1961: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes spend weeks repairing, painting, and furnishing Court Green while also establishing a regular writing schedule: Plath works in her study in the afternoons while Hughes is with Frieda, and after lunch together Hughes works in his attic study while Plath is with Frieda. With Plath’s brother Warren, who visits Court Green for a week, Hughes builds Plath a writing desk from a six-foot elm plank. Both Plath and Hughes are writing productively, Hughes commuting for recordings of his BBC programs, Plath receiving the Guinness Prize of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival and receiving solicitations for stories from women’s magazines, both of them kept busy writing book reviews. Aurelia Plath begins a monthly subscription to Ladies Home Journal for Plath and funds the purchase of a washing machine as a housewarming gift. Plath and Hughes begin to introduce themselves into the North Tawton community, meeting neighbors, the rector, shopkeepers and businesspeople. Plath begins regular care with the local midwife, Winifred Davies, who also recommends a dentist in nearby Exeter. Plath and Hughes harvest potatoes and apples from Court Green’s neglected garden and orchard.

October 22, 1961: Sylvia Plath writes "The Moon and the Yew Tree" after Ted Hughes assigns her to write about the full moon rising over the yew tree in the churchyard seen from their bedroom. With neighbors Rose and Percy Key, Plath attends Evensong at the Anglican church next door.

November, 1961: Sylvia Plath receives the Eugene F. Saxton grant, which awards her $2000 to pay for childcare and household expenses while she works on her first novel. As The Bell Jar has already been accepted for British publication by William Heinemann, Plath asks her editor to delay publication so that she can submit the manuscript in quarterly installments to the Saxton committee, as required by the terms of the grant — thus freeing herself to write a second book on the grant money.

December 1961: Though Ted Hughes has not fulfilled the terms of his Maugham prize by travelling abroad, the grantors of the prize allow him to keep the award money, making it possible for Plath and Hughes to pay off the mortgage on Court Green. Plath sews curtains and window seat cushions with red corduroy material and Hughes builds a doll cradle, which Plath paints with hearts and flowers and birds, for Frieda’s Christmas gift. Now eight months pregnant, Plath spends little time writing until after the birth of her baby. Court Green is consistently, frigidly cold despite the coal stove that heats the kitchen, two fireplaces, and small, portable heaters that are moved from room to room.

January 17, 1962: Nicholas Farrar Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’ second child, is born at Court Green.

Late January 1962: Ted Hughes’s play The Wound is broadcast on the BBC. Sylvia Plath and Hughes learn they will be included in a British anthology of New Poets of England and America. The Critical Quarterly anthology edited by Plath is published. In a letter to her mother Plath writes of being "discovered" as local literary celebrities by their North Tawton neighbors. Plath renews her studies of German, Italian and French by listening to BBC radio language programs.

March 1962: Court Green’s grounds are blanketed in narcissi and daffodils, which Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes harvest weekly by the hundreds and sell in the village. Plath renews her morning schedule of writing and reading in her study. She writes her only play, Three Women, composed of three women’s experiences of pregnancy and birth, and in a letter to her mother confides her feeling that her "real" life began with the births of her children.

Spring 1962: Ted Hughes begins undergoing regular dentistry appointments in Exeter and travels frequently to London on BBC business. Sylvia Plath and Hughes begin working earnestly on their gardening, including poisoning snails, and making further improvements to Court Green though the weather continues to be cold and rainy until Easter. Plath begins to paint and decorate various pieces of furniture with a hearts-and-flowers motif on a white background. Plath reports to her mother that she and Hughes have each had nightmares of losing Court Green. Neighbor Percy Key is increasingly ill with a lung ailment. Nicola Tyrer, daughter of the local bank manager, visits Court Green regularly, bringing her school poetry anthology, borrowing record albums, and questioning Hughes about poetry. Hughes goes fishing at the nearby river Taw several times a week, leaving Court Green before sunrise.

April 1, 1962: Frieda Hughes receives a stationary spring rocking horse as a gift for her second birthday.

Early April 1962: Court Green’s cobblestone hallway and downstairs playroom are cemented and floored with linoleum. Sylvia Plath begins to write poetry with regularity through May.

April 10, 1962: Sylvia Plath is interviewed at Court Green for a BBC radio program on Americans who live in England. Ted Hughes goes to tea at the home of Nicola Tyrer; upon his return that evening, Plath opens Court Green’s front door and finds Hughes and Nicola Tyrer standing on the garden path under the laburnum trees, which arouses Plath’s jealousy.

April 17, 1962: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes are summoned by neighbor Rose Key to her nearby cottage, where Percy Key is suffering from a stroke.

April 18, 1962: In Court Green’s garden Ted Hughes shows Frieda a baby crow, which bites Frieda.

April 19, 1962: Sylvia Plath completes the poem "Elm" at the end of a creative rush in which she writes six poems in two weeks.

April 21, 1962: Ted Hughes’ aunt and cousin from Yorkshire arrive at Court Green for a weekend visit.

April 22, 1962: On Easter Sunday, Rose Key calls across the lilac hedge as Ted Hughes is photographing Sylvia Plath and their children among the daffodils in Court Green’s garden.

May 14, 1962: The Colossus and Other Poems is published in the U.S. by Alfred A. Knopf. Plath has been chosen for inclusion on the BBC’s "Living Poet" radio series.

May 18-20, 1962: David and Assia Wevill come to Court Green, which is in full spring bloom, for a weekend visit. On May 19 Ted Hughes takes David Wevill on a tour of Dartmoor while Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill weed onions in the garden. At breakfast one morning Assia Wevill reports having a dream of a pike with a human fetus floating in its eye. Upon returning to London Assia Wevill sends Platha gros point tapestry supplies as a thank-you gift.

May 21, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "The Rabbit Catcher" and another poem expressing the narrator’s alienation in marriage.

June 1962: The BBC accepts Sylvia Plath’s dramatic poem, Three Women, for production and broadcast. Ted Hughes visits Assia Wevill’s office in London, leaving her a note that initiates their affair. Plath is busy sewing, painting, gardening and making further repairs to Court Green in preparation for her mother’s summer visit.

June 7, 1962: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes attend a meeting of local beekeepers and are offered a used hive.

June 15, 1962: The day before their sixth wedding anniversary, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes install a swarm of bees in their apple orchard, housing the bees in the used hive that Plath has painted and decorated. Hughes is stung six times as he is chased through the orchard by the bees.

June 21, 1962: Aurelia Plath arrives for a six-week visit to Court Green and stays until early August.

June 25, 1962: Percy Key dies at home in his cottage next to Court Green.

June 29, 1962: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes attend the funeral of Percy Key in North Tawton.

June 30, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "Berke-Plage" about the death of Percy Key.

July 2, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "The Other" about Assia Wevill. During this week Ted Hughes travels to London, ostensibly on BBC business, but also to see Assia.

July 9-10, 1962: Sylvia and Aurelia Plath drive to Exeter for a day of sightseeing and shopping. Upon their return Sylvia Plath intercepts a telephone call for Ted Hughes from Assia Wevill and rips the telephone from its connection, ending phone service at Court Green for the next three months. On July 10, Hughes leaves Court Green at Plath’s request, beginning a period of intermittent separations that continues until October. Plath writes only three poems between July 11 and the end of September.

July 16-24, 1962: Aurelia Plath stays at the home of Winifred Davies to allow Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes more privacy. On July 25 Aurelia Plath returns to Court Green to care for the children while her daughter and Hughes travel to Wales for a reading engagement. While in Wales Plath and Hughes discuss their marital difficulties with old friends, mentioning the possibility of a temporary separation.

August 1962: Sylvia Plath and her children are frequently ill with flu throughout this month. Plath and Ted Hughes purchase a piano for the children’s playroom and harvest the first of the season’s apples from their orchard. Hughes travels frequently to see Assia Wevill, often staying in London for days at a time. Though she rejects the idea of divorce, Plath agrees to a trial separation of six months, beginning in November. Plath and Hughes plan a trip to Ireland in September, which is viewed by Plath as a chance to recover her health and attempt to reconcile her marriage.

August 4, 1962: Aurelia Plath returns to the U.S.

August 20, 1962: With help from Winifred Davies, Sylvia Plath harvests the combs from her beehive, extracting six jars of honey.

August 27, 1962: Sylvia Plath begins weekly horseback riding lessons in the nearby village of Corsecomb, just north of Dartmoor.

September 1962: Sylvia Plath’s illnesses continue, including high fevers as well as influenza. Ted Hughes makes covert plans with Assia Wevill to holiday with her in Spain.

September 11-15, 1962: Leaving a hired nanny to care for the children at Court Green, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes travel to Ireland for a week-long holiday, visiting first with friends in Dublin, then traveling to the village of Cleggan on the coast of Connemara, where Plath hopes to find a cottage to lease for the winter while Hughes spends their separation in Spain. In Cleggan Plath and Hughes stay with poet Richard Murphy, who takes them sailing to Inishbofin in Cleggan Bay and to Galway. In Galway Plath and Hughes tour sites known to them through their reading of W. B. Yeats, including Coole Park and Yeat’s tower at Ballylee. At Yeats’ tower Plath tosses coins into the river and, with Hughes, convinces Murphy to harvest apples from a tree planted by Yeats. Plath rents the cottage of a local woman from whom she also purchases a handknit sweater.

September 16-19, 1962: Ted Hughes abruptly leaves Cleggan alone. Though Sylvia Plath tells Murphy that Ted has gone hunting for the day with a friend, unbeknownst to Plath Hughes travels to Spain with Assia Wevill, where he remains for the rest of September. Plath leaves Cleggan the next day to return to Dublin, then travels home to Court Green on September 19. Upon her return Plath receives a telegram from London, ostensibly from Hughes but in fact sent for him, by prior arrangement with a friend, to disguise his whereabouts; the telegram states that Hughes might return to Court Green in a week or two. Distraught at Hughes’s telegram, Plath visits Winifred Davies, who advises her to focus on life at Court Green and to remedy her insomnia by attempting to write while the children are asleep.

September 21, 1962: Sylvia Plath continues her weekly riding lessons and begins the practice of planning some sort of outing or activity each day --- going to the village playground, inviting neighbors for tea, getting two kittens for Frieda --- to create routine and distraction for herself and the children.

September 23, 1962: In a letter to her mother Sylvia Plath states that she will never return to America.

September 25, 1962: Sylvia Plath travels to London to meet with a solicitor regarding a legal separation from Ted Hughes.

September 26, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes the first of her poems of fall 1962, all composed on the backs of drafts of The Bell Jar, Ted Hughes’ 1961 play The Calm, or pink Smith College memorandum paper, and all addressing, on some level, the collapse of her marriage and her life as a wife, daughter, or mother.

Sept. 30, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "A Birthday Present."

October 1962: Sylvia Plath reports to friends that she cannot sleep at all without medication. Her illnesses and fevers return sporadically through the first three weeks of October; she has lost twenty pounds since July. She hires a series of nannies, none of whom stay for more than a day or two. Waking each morning at dawn to write for two hours before the children awake, Plath completes at least twenty-six poems during this month.

First week of October: Ted Hughes returns to Court Green and agrees to Sylvia Plath’s decision to seek a divorce. Plath writes to her mother that she is sure Hughes intends to marry Assia Wevill, and that it is incumbent upon her to "want" a divorce. Hughes stays at Court Green for a week to pack his belongings.

Oct. 1, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "The Detective."

Oct. 2, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "The Courage of Shutting-Up."

Oct. 3, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "The Bee Meeting," the first of her sequence of bee poems.

Oct. 4, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "The Arrival of the Bee Box."

Oct. 6, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "Stings."

Oct. 7, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "The Swarm."

Oct. 9, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "Wintering."

Oct. 10, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "A Secret."

Oct. 11, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "The Applicant." Ted Hughes leaves Court Green and returns to London, where he stays with various friends for the next two weeks.

Oct. 12, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "Daddy."

Oct. 16, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "Medusa." In a letter to her mother Plath claims that she is a genius of a writer, writing the best poems of her life. Though Aurelia Plath has suggested that her daughter and grandchildren return to Wellesley for Christmas, Sylvia Plath responds that returning to the U.S. is out of the question.

Oct. 17, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "The Jailor."

Oct. 18, 1962:Sylvia Plath writes "Lesbos."

Oct. 19, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "Stopped Dead."

Oct. 20, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "Fever 103° ."

Oct. 21, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "Amnesiac."

October 22: With the help of Winifred Davies, Sylvia Plath hires Susan O’Neill-Roe, a young nurse on temporary leave from her London hospital job, as full-time nanny for the next six weeks.

Oct. 23-29, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "Lady Lazarus" and writes to her mother that she has transferred the deed to Court Green into her name.

Oct. 24, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "Cut," inspired by an injury to her thumb caused in a kitchen accident, and "Nick and the Candlestick." Plath dedicates "Cut" to Susan O’Neill-Roe.

October 25, 1962: In a letter to Olive Higgins Prouty, Sylvia Plath states that she has picked late poppies and cornflowers from her yard to decorate the desk in her study, which has become her sanctuary and the emotional center of her life.

Oct. 27, 1962: On her thirtieth birthday, Sylvia Plath writes "Ariel" and "Poppies in October," takes her weekly horseback riding lesson, and picks apples at Court Green.

Oct. 29, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "Purdah" and completes "Lady Lazarus" before traveling to London to record sixteen poems for the BBC and the Harvard Lamont Library, and to meet with the director of the British Arts Council, who has invited her to take part in a summer international poetry festival. Plath also visits poetry critic A. Alvarez and attends a literary party.

Late October 1962: Dido Merwin, upon returning to London from France to handle her recently deceased mother’s estate, invites Ted Hughes to share her mother’s flat at Montagu Square until it is sold later in the year. Sylvia Plath regains phone service at Court Green.

Nov. 4, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "The Couriers."

November 5, 1962: Heartened by her recent trip to London and her poetic breakthrough, Sylvia Plath revises her plan of spending winter in Ireland and instead decides to pursue a winter living in London. Sporting a new hairstyle and wardrobe purchased with checks sent as birthday gifts, Plath returns to London to house hunt, accompanied by Ted Hughes, and to have her infected thumb examined at the office of her trusted London physician, Dr. John Horder. Plath applies for a lease at 23 Fitzroy Road in Primrose Hill, a flat formerly occupied by W. B. Yeats and less than two blocks from her former Chalcot Square apartment, where David and Assia Wevill are still living.

November 6, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "Getting There," "The Night Dances," and "Gulliver."

November 7, 1962: Upon returning to Court Green from London, Sylvia Plath jokingly opens a volume of Yeats plays, looking for insight about the Fitzroy Road flat, and reads a seemingly providential quote in The Unicorn from the Stars.

Nov. 8, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "Thalidomide."

Nov. 11, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "Letter in November."

November 14, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes "Death & Co.", the last of the poems she will include in her as-yet untitled second poetry manuscript.

Mid-November — December 2, 1962: Sylvia Plath continues to write book reviews and poetry, though she selects no more poems for inclusion in her second collection. She and the children again fall ill with colds and flu.

November 29, 1962: Sylvia Plath reviews Lord Byron’s Wife by Malcolm Elwin for the New Statesman.

Early December 1962: After beginning a poem entitled "Sheep in Fog" on December 2, Sylvia Plath writes no poetry until December 31, focusing instead on the organization of the manuscript of forty-one poems she titles Ariel and Other Poems before the end of the month. By offering her mother as guarantor and paying a year’s rent in advance, Plath secures the Fitzroy Road flat. In a letter to her mother Plath reports that her solicitor is gathering evidence for a divorce petition, with Ted Hughes’s cooperation. Just prior to her move, Plath travels to London to purchase appliances, make arrangements for gas, electricity, and telephone service, and to sign the lease. At her final riding lesson Plath is promoted off the leading rein and is allowed to ride on her own, accompanied by her instructor. She spends four days closing Court Green for the winter, storing her apples, potatoes and onions, winterizing the garden and the beehive, turning off the utilities and entrusting the kittens and keys to a neighbor.

December 10, 1962: Sylvia Plath, with the help of Susan O’Neill-Roe, moves with her two children to 23 Fitzroy Road in London, a 3-bedroom, two-story flat with no central heating and no telephone service. The building has a blue ceramic plaque stating that W. B. Yeats resided there. Plath’s downstairs neighbor, Professor Trevor Thomas, whose previous application for the larger, upstairs flat was turned down in favor of Plath’s, refuses to help when Plath’s keys are inadvertently locked inside the flat on her moving day. Plath spends the next several weeks purchasing furniture, painting, and decorating her new home, setting up milk delivery and diaper service, searching for reliable childcare, and renewing her handful of old friendships as well as reestablishing herself professionally in London literary circles and finalizing her poetry manuscript.

December 12, 1962: Ted Hughes accompanies Sylvia Plath and their children to the London Zoo. In a subsequent letter to her mother Plath reports that Nicholas slept through the outing, though Frieda enjoyed the lions, baby elephant, owls and penguins.

December 13, 1962: Sylvia Plath takes her children to the Primrose Hill playground, a short walk from their flat.

December 14, 1962: Sylvia Plath writes the script for a broadcast of her new poems for producer Douglas Cleverdon at the BBC; she has also received a commission for a memoir on her childhood landscape, which she will title "Ocean 1212W" after her grandmother’s telephone number at the Point Shirley beach. A radio producer in Norway purchases the right to translate and broadcast "Three Women." The New Yorker renews Plath’s first-reading contract for a second year.

December 20, 1962: Sylvia Plath shops on Regent Street and attends an evening show of the Ingmar Bergman movie "Through a Glass Darkly" at the Cameo Poly Theatre.

December 21, 1962: In a letter, Sylvia Plath thanks her mother for cat-head shaped balloons for the children that she will later immortalize in a January poem, and reports that she has decorated her bedroom and its furnishings in bee colors, while the rest of the flat is decorated in a blue theme.

December 25, 1962: By Christmas Sylvia Plath, Frieda and Nicholas have all become ill with flu and colds. They spend the holiday in London, visiting friends at midday, Plath having rejected an earlier invitation from Ted Hughes to accompany him to Yorkshire. Hughes spends Christmas with his relatives in Heptonstall.

December 26, 1962: A major snowstorm begins and continues through much of the month of January, paralyzing London and causing freeze-ups, power outages, and various shortages across the country. The Boxing Day Snowstorm initiates what will be considered England’s coldest, stormiest winter since 1740.

Late December, 1962: At Sylvia Plath’s request, Ted Hughes travels to Court Green for red curtain material and other household supplies she left behind at the time of her move to London. Hughes moves from Montagu Square to a rented flat at 110 Cleveland Street in Soho. The Bell Jar is rejected for U.S. publication by editors at Alfred A. Knopf and by Harper & Row, both editors citing the story’s subjectivity and lack of authorial distance as part of their rationale for not offering to publish.

Dec. 31, 1962: Sylvia Plath completes the poem "Eavesdropper," begun in early December. Frieda starts attending a neighborhood nursery school two mornings a week.

January 1963: Sylvia Plath and her children continue to be ill and isolated, the extreme weather conditions making life beyond the flat virtually impossible, the continued lack of telephone service effectively cutting them off from regular outside contact. London Magazine publishes "Stopped Dead" and "The Applicant."

January 10, 1963: Despite having no electricity and having to work by candlelight, Sylvia Plath completes a review of Donald Hall’s Contemporary American Poetry anthology for subsequent broadcast on the BBC Third Programme. She and the children become so ill with flu that Dr. Horder orders them a live-in nurse for a week and arranges for a housekeeper to clean the flat.

January 14 1963: The Bell Jar is published in England by William Heinemann Ltd., under the psuedonymous authorship of Victoria Lucas.

January 28, 1963: Sylvia Plath completes "Sheep in Fog," left unfinished on December 2, and writes three more poems: "Munich Mannequins," "Totem," and "Child."

January 29, 1963: Sylvia Plath writes the poems "Paralytic" and "Gigolo."

Late January 1963: Sylvia Plath writes "Snow Blitz," a humorous piece on the terrible weather, and "America! America!", on her early school years, both essays commissioned by Punch. She hires a young German au pair.

First week of February 1963: Increasingly depressed, Sylvia Plath confides her mental state to Dr. Horder and explains her psychiatric history to him for the first time. He begins to see Plath daily and immediately prescribes a mono-amine oxidase inhibitor antidepressant. As Plath’s condition deteriorates, Dr. Horder seeks out psychiatrist and specialist referrals for Plath, including Dr. Katharina Dalton, a long-time colleague who specializes in what is now known as PMDD, or premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Dr. Horder also attempts to find suitable hospitalization for Plath.

February 1, 1963: Sylvia Plath writes the poems "Mystic," "Kindness," and "Words."

February 4, 1963: Sylvia Plath writes the poem "Contusion." In a letter to her mother Sylvia Plath again states that she will not return to the U.S. and that she is scheduled to begin seeing a woman doctor, arranged by Dr. Horder.

February 5, 1963: Sylvia Plath writes the poems "Balloons" and "Edge."

February 7, 1963: Sylvia Plath fires her au pair after a disagreement. Desperate for help, Plath contacts Jillian and Gerry Becker, friends in nearby Islington, who invite Plath and her children to stay with them. Plath, hysterical and on the verge of delirium, arrives with Frieda and Nicholas but without any changes of clothing or baby supplies. Jillian Becler drives back to Fitzroy Road with Plath’s list of needed supplies, which includes a particular cocktail outfit, curlers, and cosmetics.

February 8, 1963: Dr. Horder, who is trying unsuccessfully to find Sylvia Plath a hospital bed for the weekend as well as a psychiatrist, advises the Beckers to allow Plath to take care of her children. After a long telephone conversation with Dr. Horder, Plath takes her cocktail outfit and beauty supplies and drives off in her Morris wagon for the evening. Plath returns later to the Beckers’ home, her hair curled, in a taxi. After Plath’s death Ted Hughes recalls seeing her for a short time that night at Fitzroy Road.

February 10, 1963: Sylvia Plath sleeps for the first time in four days. She insists, upon awakening, on going home, assuring the Beckers that Dr. Horder has arranged for a nurse to arrive at Fitzroy Road at 9 a.m. the following day, and that she has a lunch date with her publisher. Gerry Becker drives Plath and the children home, Plath weeping all the way, and stays at the flat on Fitzroy Road for two hours trying to persuade Plath to return to Islington with him. Dr. Horder visits Plath at home late that night.

February 11, 1963: Sylvia Plath commits suicide. As they are legally married at the time of her death, Ted Hughes becomes the executor of Plath’s personal and literary estates.

February 16, 1963: Sylvia Plath, her headstone later reading "Sylvia Plath Hughes," is buried in the new cemetery at the Church of St. Thomas á Beckett, Heptonstall, Yorkshire.

February 17, 1963: The Observer publishes A. Alvarez’s memorial to Sylvia Plath, "A Poet’s Epitaph," which concludes that "the loss to literature is inestimable." Alvarez includes the poem "Edge," one of the last two poems written by Plath, as well as "The Fearful," "Kindness," and "Contusion."

Late February 1963: Assia Wevill, pregnant by Ted Hughes, has an abortion in London.

Late 1963: Though only three of the poems Sylvia Plath intended for Ariel and Other Poems were published during her life, by the end of 1963 nearly all have been published by the periodicals to which she submitted them, and a few others broadcast on the BBC. The Bell Jar is now commonly known to have been written by Sylvia Plath.

1963-1964: Ted Hughes negotiates for the British and U.S. publication of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel and Other Poems manuscript. In a 1995 Paris Review interview, Hughes recalls that Faber and Faber was willing to publish Plath’s manuscript in any form. However, Hughes met with resistance from American publishers, only one of whom was willing to publish at all, and only on the condition that the manuscript be cut down to twenty poems. Hughes further recalls that "few magazine editors would publish the Ariel poems, few liked them;" (Hughes is mistaken on this point, as by the end of 1963 only 5 of the forty-one poems Plath selected for Ariel had not been either published or recorded for radio broadcast.) As Hughes wished to publish some of the last poems Plath had not intended for Ariel, he compromised with the U.S. publisher Harper & Row by editing Plath’s manuscript, deleting 14 of her selections, inserting 13 of his own, and reordering the resulting manuscript of 40 poems into chronological order.

Sources other than the Paris Review reveal that finances, rather than editorial concerns, affected the publication of Ariel. Correspondence at the Ted Hughes archive at Emory University shows that Faber and Faber, Ted Hughes’ publisher, gained the right to publish Ariel in England because it offered far more financial incentives than William Heinemann, Ltd, Sylvia Plath’s British publisher. In the U.S., Harper & Row, Ted Hughes’ publisher, was given the right to publish its edition of Ariel by meeting the financial terms of the Faber and Faber contract, which Alfred A. Knopf, Sylvia Plath’s publisher, refused.

March 1965: Ariel, Poems by Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes, is published by Faber and Faber in England.

October 7, 1965: A review of the British edition of Ariel, Poems by Sylvia Plath by critic George Steiner reveals, for the first time, that Plath committed suicide.

June 1966: Ariel, Poems by Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes, is published in the U. S. by Harper & Row. Robert Lowell’s introduction states that "these poems are playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder." Both Time and Newsweek run major, sensational reviews of Ariel, each revealing Plath’s suicide and the breakdown of her marriage to Ted Hughes. Ariel sells close to 40,000 copies in its first year after publication, and will become one of the bestselling books of poetry of the twentieth century. During this same year, William Heinemann Ltd. publishes The Bell Jar under the name of Sylvia Plath.

March 1969: Assia Wevill, distraught over her faltering relationship to Ted Hughes, commits suicide with their four-year-old daughter, Shura, in London.

1970: After many years of fruitless negotiation with Aurelia Plath, who is adamantly against the publication of The Bell Jar in the U.S., Ted Hughes offers Aurelia Plath permission to publish an edited edition of Sylvia Plath’s letters to her if she will agree not to block American publication of The Bell Jar. Aurelia Plath agrees to Hughes’s terms.

April 1971: Harper & Row publishes a U.S. edition of The Bell Jar, which remains on the New York Times Best Seller list for six months.

May 1971: Faber and Faber publishes Crossing the Water, a selection of Sylvia Plath’s poems written between The Colossus and Ariel, compiled by Ted Hughes.

September 1971: Faber and Faber publishes Winter Trees, which Ted Hughes describes in his Introduction as poems written by Sylvia Plath during the last year of her life.

September 1971: Harper & Row publishes Crossing the Water in a slightly different editorial selection than the British edition.

September 1972: Harper & Row publishes Winter Trees in a slightly different editorial selection than the British edition.

December 1975: After three years of editing and negotiations with Ted Hughes regarding final selections of Sylvia Plath’s letters, Harper & Row publishes Letters Home by Sylvia Plath: Correspondence 1950-1963, edited by Aurelia Plath.

April 1976: Faber and Faber publishes the British edition of Aurelia Plath’s Letters Home.

October 1977: Faber and Faber publishes Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, an anthology of Sylvia Plath’s short stories, essays, and journal excerpts edited and introduced by Ted Hughes. Harper & Row publishes an expanded American edition shortly thereafter.

September 1981: The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, edited and introduced by Ted Hughes, is published in England by Faber and Faber to widespread international reviews. In his introduction, Hughes discloses that Sylvia Plath had arranged her Ariel poems in a careful sequence in December 1962, pointing out at the time that the manuscript began with the word "love" and ended with the word "spring." Noting that the published Ariel is "somewhat different" from Plath’s intended volume, Hughes gives the exact order of the original Ariel text in the Notes section of The Collected Poems.

November 1981: The U.S. edition of Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems is published by Harper & Row.

March 1982: The Journals of Sylvia Plath, significantly edited by Frances McCullough, who also edited Plath’s posthumous books for Harper & Row, is published by The Dial Press in the U.S. In his Introduction, Ted Hughes mentions Plath’s two final journals, stating that he destroyed the final one and that the other disappeared. The Journals sells out immediately and generates major reviews. The Plath estate, controlled by Ted Hughes and agented by his sister Olwyn Hughes, decline to publish the Journals anywhere but in the U.S.

April 22, 1982: Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems receives the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

May 1984: Ted Hughes is appointed Poet Laureate of England.

November 1984: Respected literary critic Marjorie Perloff publishes the first major critical article on Sylvia Plath’s original manuscript of Ariel and Other Poems. Perloff points out that the original Ariel possesses a narrative trajectory quite different from that compiled by Hughes, though the success of the published Ariel and The Collected Poems have made them the accepted texts. Perloff asserts that Sylvia Plath’s literary legacy can only be fully assessed through a consideration of her artistic intentions for Ariel and Other Poems.

February 1998: Ted Hughes publishes The Birthday Letters (Faber and Faber; Farrar Straus & Giroux), his poetic evocation of his relationship with Sylvia Plath. The Birthday Letters becomes an international bestseller.

October 26, 1998: Ted Hughes dies of complications from colon cancer.

2001: Though there have been many dozens of books and hundreds of articles published on Sylvia Plath and her work in the nearly forty years since her death, Plath scholar Lynda K. Bundtzen’s The Other Ariel (University of Massachusetts Press) is the first published book-length critical study of Sylvia Plath’s original manuscript for Ariel and Other Poems.

February 2003: Forty years after Sylvia Plath’s death, Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath is the first published book, fiction or nonfiction, to address each of the forty-one poems, in their original order, that Plath selected for Ariel and Other Poems.