Yeats' house

Yeats' house is the London home Sylvia Plath found during the painful transition that followed her separation from Ted Hughes. More than a place to live, it became a private sign of possibility: after despairing that she would never find a flat, Plath discovered that the house she had longed to inhabit was available and treated the coincidence as confirmation that she could begin again.

Discovery on Primrose Hill

After a vacation in Ireland, Plath and Hughes decided to separate for a while. Plath was commuting to London, looking for a flat and, as she told a friend, getting work with the BBC. She had recently visited Yeats' tower at Ballylea, which she remembered as beautiful and peaceful. Back in London, she walked around Primrose Hill, brooding over the apparent hopelessness of finding a home.

She had often passed Yeats' house and wished she could live there. On this walk, she noticed a board advertising flats to rent and hurried to the agent. She was the first to apply. The long-sought home was thus found not through an extended search but through a sudden opening in the familiar streets she had been walking in despondently.

A Home Taken as a Sign

Plath called the discovery a small miracle. She emphasized the contrast between her bleak expectation that no suitable flat could be found and the chance to rent the very house she had repeatedly passed and wanted. She secured a five-year lease and described the place as utter heaven, adding that its association with Yeats meant a great deal to her at that moment.

The house also altered the meaning of her search. Plath told a friend that she had known she would find a flat when she set out that day; finding Yeats' house seemed to confirm that intuition. With that confirmation, she began making plans with energetic assurance. The home’s importance in this account lies not only in shelter or location, but in the confidence Plath attached to its arrival during a period of separation and uncertainty.

Work and Renewal

The house became the setting for a new phase of work. Plath was writing a novel about more recent events in her life, which she regarded as strong, powerful, and urgent, while the Ariel poems continued to flow. By contrast, she described The Bell Jar to a friend as an autobiographical apprentice work she had needed to write in order to free herself from the past. The distinction links the new home to a forward-looking creative moment without suggesting that the difficulties surrounding her move had vanished.

A few days before Christmas, Plath moved herself and the children to London. The manuscript of The Bell Jar had been sent to the trustees of the Saxton Fellowship in the United States, and Heinemann had accepted the novel in England and was setting it into type. Against this backdrop of professional activity and personal upheaval, Yeats' house offered a tangible place from which Plath could make plans. Its significance rests in that conjunction: a home found at a moment of dislocation became, for her, an emblem of renewed direction.