27th February 2026


Helen Bain The Daffodil Days


T


he Daffodil Days’ protagonist, a glitter- ing, semi-fictionalised Sylvia Plath, is stand- ing in a small, coun-


tryside clothing boutique, shooting the breeze with a sales assistant, when she says something intrigu- ing: “It took me back to when I was working at The Bookseller… I spent a few weeks pasting up layouts for them.” So writes Helen Bain in an early


chapter of her quietly assured, forensically researched debut novel. Speaking to me over video call from her home in Sussex, the novelist is quick to confirm that, yes, Plath did spend time on The Bookseller’s editorial desk. “I’ve found the letter, written in January 1961, when Plath is writing to her mother and saying, ‘I’ve been work- ing at The Bookseller,’ and saying how much she loves it,” Bain tells me, lifting a large, hardback collec- tion of Plath correspondence into frame. “In prep for the interview,” the writer smiles. The Daffodil Days is packed with Plathian nuggets like this one. Written as part of a creative writing PhD at King’s College London – where Bain was supervised by Booker Prize-longlisted author Benjamin Wood – the novel is predominantly set in 1962, the year Plath moved to the Devonshire village of North Tawton with her husband Ted Hughes. We encoun- ter the couple through a cast of 16 narrators, including the local GP, riding instructor and cleaner, as well as a stream of visiting friends. They each have an opinion on the poet; few are neutral. “We’re all different things to


different people,” Bain says, explaining that a multivoiced structure allowed her to examine Plath from a variety of angles. This was important to the novelist, who wanted The Daffodil Days to


06


challenge the reputational flatten- ing suffered by Plath. “She was very gregarious. And


she was very outgoing. And I don’t know if those words are necessarily associated with Plath as a cultural icon,” says Bain. “I mean, she talked and talked and talked – and if you go to the archives, you see that immediately. But it’s not the image of the writer at her desk, depressed.” By getting the Ariel poet out from


behind the writing desk and into a rural community, Bain lends Plath a vital quality largely missing from popular discourse. This Plath grows flowers, tends to a beehive and saddles up to hack out over Dartmoor’s tall, stony tors – she even tries her hand at bellringing in the local church. We meet Plath, Bain tells me, “with her feet in her vegetable plot”: “I just loved the contradiction of this highly educated American girl from Boston being in semi-rural Devon. In so much mud! And she loves it. This is what’s so endearing about her.”


This is not to say that the novel


sidesteps Plath’s less cosy qualities. She retains a volatile energy that presents itself without real cause. Her relationship with North Tawton’s GP Hugh Webb, for example, exposes the poet’s sharp, suspicious streak. Rooted in fact – Plath’s poem Cut immortalises the hand injury treated by Webb – episodes like this demonstrate the balanced, sensitive care with which Bain treats her character. The second structural choice


Bain makes in pursuit of a different Plath is to run the novel backwards. We begin at Plath’s cottage, Court Green, in December 1962. She is not home, having travelled up to London for the winter break. Despite plans to return come spring, Plath will not see her cottage, or the pool of sunshine- yellow surrounding it, again. By the novel’s close, it is July 1961, and there are 19 months until Plath’s passing. “The structure tries to challenge the idea that there’s any sense of


inevitability or fate in anyone’s life,” Bain explains. “If the book moves away from the point of Plath’s death, my hope is that it opens up the reader to this idea that we’re all making hundreds of tiny choices every day that shape a future. The further back you get from something, the more of these tiny choices there are that we’re making without even thinking about it. There isn’t an inevitability. “For Plath’s death to be seen


as a sort of culmination of the poems that she was writing or the Ariel persona is pretty offensive, I think, as well as being reductive. I’m trying to dismantle that whole mythology.” A love letter to Dartmoor, and


to the writer who lived there, Bain’s is a smart debut that sheds new light on one of our most enigmatic creatives.


REPORTING Daisy Game


Bloomsbury,12th March 2026, HB, £18.99, 9781526697714


Debuts of the Year Author Profile


SARAH WEAL


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