Fiction: The line "Please send my Joy of Cooking" made me snort with laughter when an adaptation of Sylvia Plath's Letters Home was performed at the Peacock Theatre in the early 1980s. During that era of the feminist appropriation of the poet, her housewifery did not only seem witless; it seemed part of what killed her.
If I've matured a little, hopefully feminism has too. If the next challenge of feminism is to rehabilitate motherhood, it seems now that Sylvia Plath was there before us. The task which she set herself, of being creative as a mother and an artist, is still a desperate one for today's women. In Plath's day, it was unheard of. Which is partly why she is unquestionably the great poet on motherhood in English. Name the others . . .
It is this Plath whom Kate Moses, writer and mother of two, needs. It is this Plath she has fictionalised in Wintering, a novel based on the last months of the poet's life. In doing this, she has surely understood the woman and the poet well. But of course, she has understood her from the distance of another culture.
True, the last journals were destroyed by Ted Hughes, but it is still remarkable how few are the hints of her experience of labour or breast-feeding. It just wasn't done to mention such things in those days, and it is likely this censorship of words became also censorship of thought. Lines like "Becoming a mother: it was the galvanising moment of her life" show Moses straying far from Plath, and yet one can undestand her desire to fill Plath's silence.
It is this act of imagination which is the success of this first novel. Read, studied and written about by men and by childless women (such as the snorting student in the theatre mentioned earlier), what her last years must really have been like has rarely been imagined. Moses goes there, lying with Plath as she breast-feeds her newborn son, while her husband is downstairs in the kitchen being seduced. With Plath as she trucks two crying, freezing children in a buggy to the telephone kiosk to try to contact Ted, because she had no phone; as she wraps stocking presents alone on Christmas Eve. Though her style is often terrible and her dialogue leaden - and, just like Plath, she fails in her characterisation of all but her heroine - the book still has merit, which a new biography or critical study could not have.
She has a critical agenda, too, however, to explore the Ariel collection which Plath herself assembled, not the posthumous one edited by Ted Hughes. Beginning with the word "love" ('Morning Song') and ending with the word "spring" ('Wintering'), the collection charts the poet's crawl from the wreckage of her marriage breakdown, and reveals poems such as 'Lady Lazurus' and 'Ariel' as stories of survival. Hughes's collection and critical analysis read backwards from an almost inevitable suicide, surely a terrible misreading of both her life and work, which may have been emotionally necessary to him.
Hughes collected in his Ariel Plath's last poems, such as 'Words' and 'Edge', which are worryingly suicidal and not of a piece with the others. While the context was a mistake, still they were part of Plath, a part which Moses just can't seem to imagine. However, her perspective on the woman rightly makes sad defeat, not final victory, of the fact that she ended her life with her cheek on a folded dishtowel in a gas oven, while her tiny children woke to a silent house.
Victoria White is a writer
Wintering. By Kate Moses. Sceptre, 352 pp. £14.99