The Daffodil Days is a debut novel by Helen Bain, focusing on a year in North Tawton, a small town in Devon. It’s described as a kaleidoscopic portrait of the last year of Sylvia Plath’s and Ted Hughes’ marriage as told by the people they lived among.
Each chapter is told from a perspective of a different member of the community: the local doctor, girl who works in a boutique store, the housekeeper, the tenant farm labourer who rings the tower bells at the church three times a week. The book is told backwards. We begin just after Plath had left North Tawton for London, never to return, and we end at the couple’s decision to move to Devon.
The novel is beautifully written, unrushed and compelling. However, there seems to be a kind of essence missing. Despite the premise, our knowledge of Plath and Hughes remains vague at the end of the book, especially because the author seems to have deliberately skipped the most dramatic of North Tawton’s accidents known from the diaries and poems of both poets. In The Daffodil Days the readers never get to observe the visit of Plath’s mother in the summer of 1962, nor do they learn anything about the cataclysmal weekend visit from Assia and David Wevill, a visit that marked the beginning of the end between Plath and Hughes.
And perhaps this was the author’s intention. But despite being a fine novel in its own right and a wonderful portrait of the town and its people, there seems to be a depth missing, a psychology unexplored.
