Spooling backwards, Bain reveals the thoughts of various inhabitants of North Tawton as they encounter the Hugheses, giving a new slant to episodes familiar from Plath’s poems and letters.

In an interview some years ago, the poet Ruth Fainlight startled me with a casual reference to her friend Sylvia Plath. Seeing my awestruck expression, Ruth said dryly, “Remember, she wasn’t Sylvia Plath then.” To contemporaries she was simply another ambitious American poet married to a British writer (Plath and Ted Hughes, Fainlight and Alan Sillitoe). Helen Bain’s debut novel also concerns Plath the woman, rather than the literary superstar. Here she’s Sylvia, Sivvy, Mrs Hughes, the bright, smart wife of a taciturn Yorkshireman transplanted to a small Devon village, in what were to be her final, turbulent years.

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