The brief life of Sylvia Plath, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick wrote, ‘has been the subject for memories of no special usefulness. Sylvia Plath does not come closer, shine more clearly.’ Helen Bain’s intricately constructed first novel, The Daffodil Days, wisely forgoes concern with the poet’s essential self. Instead, Plath is presented in glimpses, in thirteen interlinked vignettes arranged in reverse chronological order. It’s set for the most part in rural Devon, where Plath lived first with Ted Hughes (they were married from August 1961 to October 1962) and then alone with two small children until they moved to London, where she killed herself two months later. Plath is seen from the perspective of friends, acquaintances and those who possess a skill she wishes to learn: horse riding, beekeeping, ringing a church bell. A haunting fourteenth chapter, set in summer in a square outside Reims Cathedral, serves as the book’s coda – or, chronologically, its prologue. We are in a fictional universe where the thirty-year-old heroine only grows younger.

In the opening pages we find ourselves at Court Green, a thatch-roofed manor house in North Tawton which is lying empty following Plath’s estrangement from Hughes. Nancy Axworthy, the grumbling housekeeper, is scrubbing linoleum. As she cleans, she reflects on its recent occupant: 

She tires of things, that’s it. Decks