Sylvia Plath, originally uploaded by sabrinalouise987.
There’s a blurry photo in the beat-up Bantam paperback “Letters Home” I bought in a secondhand bookstore in Iowa City that’s long captured my attention: Sylvia Plath poised on a stone pasture fence (or ruined wall?) in Yorkshire while visiting her poet-husband’s family. Writing home to her mother, Plath describes a visit to Top Withens, an elevated moorland spot a few miles up a jagged pathway from the Brontë Parsonage—Emily’s favored walking spot with Keeper, her mastiff—and the ruined homestead purported to be the original for Wuthering Heights.
Plath immortalized the visit with a sketch of “the deserted black stone house” and eventually, a poem, packed with vivid impressions of place that still stand: the heathered hills, the sheep with their “hard, marbly baas.”
.
Someday, I thought, as I took the image in, I’ll make that pilgrimage, though I’d never have imagined the circumstances in which my visit took place, never imagined writing the memoir my notes that day would start: December skies and scattered snow. I stand on Charlotte Bronte’s front steps, thinking I’m going to be sick. Three months pregnant, thinking about the legendary body of work crafted by these childless sisters, I looked down from the Parsonage toward the teashops that lined the steep, cobblestoned streets. It seemed foolish to follow ghosts, to browse museum cases and memorabilia (annotated volumes of the sisters’ masterpieces, teatowels, postcards, porcelain busts) and museum cases where letters, documents, and assorted curiosities that been collected and offered up for the public gaze. A small, blurred high contrast print caught my eye—the one reputed photograph of Charlotte Brontë. Iwas taken aback: the image caught little of her spirit—the ferocity with which she carved her own destiny and transmuted longing and loss and self-knowledge into the implacable Lucy Snowe, or the indomitable Jane Eyre. And there, at the end of the displays, stacks of daily newspapers, plastered with the image of Diana, magna-mater of the modern woman gracing TV screens and tabloids—a Northamptonshire girl like scale. I’ve lost the photo I know I posed for that day, taken by my daughter’s father while I paused on the Parsonage steps, too exhausted to make the trip to Top Withens, turning back from the path that energized the “scribbling sisters” and the youthful Sylvia Plath. We look to photos for clues about a subject’s life; to their words for paths to and through our own lives. In that blurry photo I still find haunting, a young writer, stylishly dressed, looks out to clear and windless skies where “the sun, by a miracle, was out…” It’s moment snatched out of time—the subject still free of what the future holds. A young woman, committed to her art, newly married, an ocean away from her homeland, stands on her literary heroine’s ground. How far, she must have thought, I’ve come; how much farther to go.
.
Jane Satterfield is the recipient of a 2007 National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature. Her poetry collections are Assignation at Vanishing Point (Elixir, 2003) and Shepherdess with an Automatic (WWPH, 2000). Among her awards are three Maryland State Arts Council Grants in Poetry, Fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. For nonfiction, she’s received the Gold Medal in the Essay from the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society, the Florida Review’s Editors’ Prize, the John Guyon Award in Literary Nonfiction and the Heekin Foundation’s Cuchulain Prize in Rhetoric for the Essay. Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of A Year in Britain and Beyond will appear on Demeter Press in 2009.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
