Yeats' house in London

Yeats' house in London is the flat Sylvia Plath found on Primrose Hill shortly before Christmas, after separating from Ted Hughes. More than a fortunate address, the house became a private refuge and a sign around which she could gather new resolve: she described living there on a five-year lease as “utter heaven.”

Discovery on Primrose Hill

After a vacation in Ireland, Plath and Hughes decided to separate for a while. The summer had been difficult, and repeated bouts of flu with high fever made another winter in Devon seem impossible. Plath began commuting to London, where she was getting work with the BBC and searching for a flat. On Primrose Hill, she passed Yeats' house, a place she had often seen and longed to live in. A board advertising flats for rent had appeared; she hurried to the agent and was the first applicant.

The discovery linked a practical housing search to a place already charged with imaginative meaning. While in Ireland, Plath had visited Yeats' tower at Ballylea and found it beautiful and peaceful. Now, walking desolately around Primrose Hill and worrying that she would never find a flat, she encountered the London house she had long admired. The coincidence transformed the search's discouragement into a sense of arrival.

A Home and a Sign

Plath interpreted finding the house as a sign. She told a friend that she had “known” she would find it when she went out looking that day; with this confirmation, she began making plans with energetic assurance. The flat was not simply shelter after a separation and a difficult period of illness. It offered a stable place from which she could imagine a next stage of life, secured by a five-year lease.

Her description of the house as “utter heaven” gives the address an emotional force that contrasts with her earlier desolation. Its importance was personal as well as literary: Plath said that living in Yeats' house meant a great deal to her at that moment. The remembered Irish tower and the London home thus converge as places associated with beauty and peace, while the London house becomes an actual domestic foothold.

Work and Renewal

The move to London coincided with a renewed sense of purpose. Plath was working on a new novel, while the poems that would form Ariel continued to flow. She described The Bell Jar as an “autobiographical apprentice work” she had needed to write to free herself from the past, and regarded the newer novel, drawn from more recent events in her life, as strong, powerful, and urgent. The house therefore stands at a transition between looking back through fiction and pursuing new work.

The move also took place amid concrete professional developments. The Bell Jar manuscript 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. Plath moved herself and the children to London a few days before Christmas. In this setting, Yeats' house joins domestic security to literary momentum: it is both a newly secured home and the place Plath treated as evidence that a difficult search could open onto a future she wanted.