Devon

Devon is the rural setting of an important but unsettled period in Sylvia Plath’s life: there, living with Ted Hughes in a thatched-roof house, she completed substantial portions of The Bell Jar and began writing the Ariel poems. The country offered a home for work, but not lasting security; after a difficult summer and repeated illness, Sylvia could not face another winter there and moved with the children to London.

A country home and a writing period

In the summer, Sylvia and Ted moved to Devon to live in a thatched-roof country house. The setting formed the domestic backdrop to Sylvia’s effort to write a novel while caring for her family. A Saxton Fellowship grant of $2,080, awarded in November 1961, gave her practical support, and she reported progress to the trustees on a regular schedule.

In February 1962, Sylvia said she had completed final versions of Chapters 5 through 8, totaling 105 pages, and had outlined Chapters 9 through 12. By May she reported completing Chapters 9 through 12, and in August she described Chapters 13 through 16, pages 167 through 221, as finished. These reports show Devon as a place where she maintained a disciplined, measurable writing routine even while she privately felt she was doing too little.

Work amid family life

The household’s days were divided among the babies, housework, and writing. Nicholas was born on January 17, 1962; less than a month later, on February 10, Sylvia sent the trustees her first quarterly account of the novel’s progress. Her reports thus record not only the book’s advancing chapters but the effort to preserve a writing schedule within family responsibilities.

During this period Sylvia also began the Ariel poems. In June 1962 she told a friend that she was writing again and wanted the new poems to be read aloud. Her husband later identified “Tulips” as the first sign of what was coming, describing a change in speed and method: she wrote it without her usual Thesaurus studies and at top speed. Devon belongs, in this account, both to the steady labor of finishing a novel and to the emergence of a different poetic momentum.

Illness, separation, and departure

The summer became difficult. Sylvia suffered repeated attacks of flu accompanied by high fever, and another winter in Devon seemed impossible. After a vacation in Ireland, she and Ted decided to separate for a while. Sylvia began commuting to London, seeking work with the BBC and looking for a flat; a few days before Christmas, she moved there with the children on a five-year lease.

Devon was not simply abandoned as a place of work. Sylvia expected to return to the house around May Day, even as the London winter brought severe hardship: heating and light failed without warning and pipes froze. She was despairing and ill, but continued writing poems into the last week of her life. The planned return makes Devon a remembered and prospective home at once, set against the dislocation of separation and the increasingly precarious present in London.

Significance in the life narrative

Devon’s significance lies in the contrast between creative progress and domestic and physical strain. Sylvia’s careful fellowship reports document a novel moving forward chapter by chapter; her emerging poems suggest a new, faster mode of writing. Yet neither achievement removed the pressures of illness, family care, or the eventual separation from Ted. The move from Devon to London marks a practical change of home and working circumstances, while the anticipated return shows that the country house remained part of Sylvia’s imagined near future until the end of her life.