Some adventures can take in more than one literary pilgrimage at the same time. Haworth and Top Withens are such places, with this Brontëan literary landscape featuring in a number of Sylvia Plath’s poems, letters, prose, and journal entries. Most of her writing stresses the lonely and blustering nature of the place – blackened gravestones paving the ground in front of the Brontë Parsonage, withered trees, open moors of heather and sheep, a tumble-down building clinging to the moor side at Top Withens.

In an account of a Withens walk published in The Christian Science Monitor on 6 June 1959, Plath describes there being “as many ways to get to Withens as there are compass points” yet in her journal three years earlier she knew of only two ways, “both tiresome.” One from the public route in town over stone stiles and through pastureland with grass “too green to believe.” An old carriage path, losing itself but not lost, led the way to the ruined house, littered with sheep skulls and matted grey hair. The second route is across hills and through bogs, across untouched earth, burnt bracken “all eternity, wildness, loneliness” until the ruins appear with two inhospitable trees on the leeside of the hill.

On my pilgrimage, I walked to Top Withens from Haworth. No dour skies or lonely howling winds accompanied me as I hiked from town to moor, but rather a blistering sun and a warm wind that took the edge off the unseasonal heat-wave. I have been to Withens twice before, both in much sterner weather more fitting for the supposed inspiration of Wuthering Heights. It is always an odd experience as I feel myself following the traces of two women years apart in history: Plath following Emily Brontë and me following Plath following Emily Brontë.

Much feels unchanged from Plath’s description – the beginning of the moor spreads away from Haworth behind Penistone Hill gradually becoming browner and increasingly bare. The “grandmotherly” sheep still graze among grass and heather. Staring into their eyes is still like “being mailed into space”

Not so far along the stony path from town to moor is the Brontë waterfall and bridge. Plath described this bridge in “A Walk to Withens” as “a wooden footbridge.” Today it has undergone some changes. At some stage the wooden bridge became a stone one which was washed away in a flash flood in 1989. Rebuilt in 1990 it is now a humpbacked, slabby path over the river resting on the remains of the older stone bridge beneath.

It is at this point according to Plath that the “sheep are separated from the goats” meaning the walk becomes tougher, lonelier, a little more challenging. The trees become sparser and up a slight slope I see a sign which I suspect would not have been present when Plath walked these moors: directions to “Top Withins” (sic) in both English and Japanese.

Soon after this point, you get your first glimpse of the remains of the house, the only building in sight on the moor flanked by two tall trees. For readers of Wuthering Heights, this small, stony house bears no relation to the looming mansion Emily Brontë describes so vividly. A plaque on the side of the building acknowledges it is most likely the place that inspired her, not the house. Plath too felt this discrepancy and yet there was some thread of recognition, a feeling or atmosphere that led her to write, “And yet so strong were my impressions of the book, I felt at Withens that presence which endows places long loved and lived in with a radiance subject to no alteration or ruining by wind and rain.”

The house itself at Top Withens is a ruin, yet it has clearly been cleaned and tidied, the stone no longer black or showing much sign of weathering. The foundation and outline of each room is still visible, window arches look out across purple slopes and the remains of fireplaces and chimneys are now grown over with tufts of brown, scratchy moor grass. Plath writes: “Two sizeable trees rise like natural pillars before the house, oddly tall in the lee of the windswept hill where nothing else grows higher than a gorse bush”. In the poem “Wuthering Heights” which Ted Hughes included in his collection Birthday Letters, he describes Plath sitting in the crook of one of these trees sketching the ruin at Top Withens. Now, compared to a photograph taken of her on that day, the tree is somewhat taller in the seventy years that have passed.

As Plath surveyed the scene at Top Withens, she wrote that lines from Dylan Thomas suddenly sprang to her mind: “the bracken kitchens rust”. Indeed, she stated, rust-coloured bracken grows everywhere “where housewives of a century ago tended their kettles and roasts over fires bright as today’s grouse and rabbit-peopled hills.” Nature has encroached as nature does in such places and it is surrounded by an eerie open wildness. Tim Edensor noted how in ruins, “the Gothic intrudes mingling the living (plants, fungi, birds) and all that points to death – in the slow process of corrosion, things give up their solidity, their weight, become spectral forms bearing traces of their past.” It is these traces that engage our imagination, that engaged Plath’s imagination, and that engaged Emily Brontë’s imagination as she manifested Cathy and Heathcliff on the moors of Wuthering Heights. Ruins become imbued with new associations, new meanings, and Edensor beautifully describes how “fragments of ordered space fall out of their previous contexts to recombine like elements in dreams, tumbling down from their assigned places to mingle in a random ongoing reordering, shaped by where things happen to land, in disarray.”

And in some ways, it is in this disarray that we find ourselves today. In the remembered loss of Sylvia Plath and Emily Brontë, their literary vision still fixed on the stone walls of Top Withens, their gazes taking in the sweeping hills of gorse. Stare, Plath wrote, stare until your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind. You can almost see Plath and Brontë, two women defying time, walking across these moors together.

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I don’t know why I have never read her before now, but anyway, about two years ago I bought an old penguin copy of The Death of the Heart from a second-hand book store. It lay on my ‘to-read’ pile since then, until a couple of months ago during a sleepless night when I started to read it. Now I am currently enjoying a Bowen-fest, working my way chronologically through her novels and stories. Needless to say, I am smitten.

I knew, of course, that there was a Plath connection. A young Sylvia Plath while working for Mademoiselle had interviewed Elizabeth Bowen in the home of May Sarton at 14 Wright Street, Cambridge, Mass on 26th May 1953. It was famously captured in a series of photographs by a Mademoiselle photographer (see below.) They show a smiling and slightly adoring looking Plath interviewing and engaged in discussion with the older writer. Bowen’s advice was that a young writer should “move about the world and keep in contact with people” and keep away from jobs that waste creative energy. Aspiring writers need, according to Bowen, “both criticism and encouragement.” For her own part, Bowen claimed she turned to writing short stories when she failed as a poet, and even then, still preferred the format of a short story to a novel. Her own work sprang out of visual impressions and did not see print without much re-working.

To what extent might Plath have read Bowen to prepare for this interview? Library cards at Smith College show that Plath signed out a number of Bowen novels and stories with a return due date of 28th May 1953. She appeared to read the following books; Early Stories, Seven Winters, and Ivy Gripped the Steps. Her calendar indicates that she read The Death of the Heart also on 25 May. Clearly she researched her interview subject well. After the interview, Bowen and Plath exchanged letters. Although there is no known copy of the letter Plath wrote to Bowen, the reply, held at Lilly Library, Indiana University, was sent from Bowen’s Court in Ireland on 9th June 1953. It showed warm appreciation in which Bowen stated how lovely it had been to meet Plath and that she hoped to be reading some of Plath’s own books in the future.

Might, however, there be a major Bowen influence in Plath’s work that has previously been overlooked? While reading Bowen’s first novel, The Hotel (1927), I encountered some startling imagery that led me directly back to Plath. In this novel, set on the Italian Riviera, the plot follows the guests and their relationships through a hot and lazy summer. Friendships are forged and broken, love affairs take place, and characters are beautifully and subtly drawn by Bowen in poetic and evocative language. One scene, however, between two major protagonists, Sydney and Milton, takes place on a sunny hillside and involves a proposal. The imagery used is as follows:

“In the expanse of the free air she had laughed and felt that neither of them were realer than the scenery. Now, at some tone in his voice she was surprised by a feeling that some new mood, not of her own, was coming down over them like a bell-glass. The bright reality of the view, the consciousness of the unimportant, safe little figures were shut away from her; they were always there but could no longer help. She felt the bell-glass finally descend as he, after a glance around at the other benches and over the edge of the plateau, said quickly, ‘The thing is, Sydney, aren’t I ever to know you?’ (p.95)

‘Very well,’ said Milton and the bell-glass lifted, though it hung above them. She felt as though this image must have presented itself to him also, for he drew as though released from constriction another deep breath of air. (p. 96)

Compare this to the imagery Plath chose to use in The Bell Jar (1963):

“...because wherever I sat – on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok – I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.’ (p. 196)

“All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.” (p. 227)

“But I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure at all. How did I know that someday – at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere – the bell jar with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?” (p. 254)

The coincidence and similarity is startling and raises the obvious question: did Plath ever read The Hotel? In one of those mysterious and ambiguous moments that history often throws at us, the answer is, it is impossible to know. Smith College holds a 1928 edition of The Hotel which would have been on the shelves during Plath’s time there and certainly during the spring of 1953. However, Karen Kukil informed me that in recent years the book has been rebound and the original check out card is missing.

In her letters and journal the previous year, Plath had already drawn upon the image of suffocating under a bell jar. A journal entry on Friday 11th July 1952 describes her fear of giving up her summer job at The Belmont Hotel on Cape Cod and returning home to long, unstructured 12 hour days for 10 weeks: “It is like lifting a bell jar off a securely clockwork-like functioning community and seeing all the little busy people stop, gasp, blow up and float in the inrush (or rather outrush) of the rarified scheduled atmosphere...” (2000: 118). In a letter to Marcia Brown written between 23-24 July 1952 and held at Smith College, Plath describes the “rarified atmosphere” of her life so far as though living under a bell jar.

So there are a number of possibilities. One, that Bowen and Plath independently created this imagery in a startling co-incidence. Two, that Plath having already used the metaphor of the bell jar, read a similar account in The Hotel and then drew on Bowen’s notion of the ascending -descending bell-glass. Three, that Plath read The Hotel and unconsciously drew on Bowen’s imagery when writing her own novel in London eight years later. Whatever, it is certainly an exciting and playful way to read Plath and Bowen, two of my favourite authors, and makes me look at their photographs together in a whole new light. I like the idea of some sort of creative osmosis between these two powerful women. I also like the maddening mystery of never quite knowing.

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Being new to Substack feels like landing in a city that you have never visited before. You don’t know many people and you don’t know your way around. You don’t really know where to go or what to look at. I hope that changes soon.

My reason for starting Substack is to try and build a supportive and engaging community around the theme of The Disquieting Muses; those women in the world who are troublemakers and misunderstood for a whole load of different reasons. With intersectional feminism at the heart, my aim is to eventually provide a hybrid Substack, with some shorter pieces openly available and some longer publishable standard pieces via paid subscription. Ideally there will be one longer piece per month so that by the end of the year, subscribers will have an anthology of essays based on women and subjects that I love to write about: objects, places, photographs, cultural moments, archives.

The online world feels so fractured and toxic right now, that I’d just like to pull together a space for shared interests and hopefully form part of a community of people who want to contemplate questions such as:

Why was Sylvia Plath’s house in Devon so important to her unique Ariel poems?

What were some of the most enlightening objects in Anne Sexton’s archive?

What does it feel like to use something that belonged to Sylvia Plath?

Why was Dorothy Parker’s main achievement overlooked?

In what way was Marilyn Monroe a subversive hiding in plain sight?

The world is full of disquieting muses, so let’s be unsettled, and disruptive, together.