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Lorelei Bauer is a modern day woman with a penchant for Sylvia Plath, a woman struggling with the injustices of the fifties with her marriage, her role and status as a poet, her “job” as a mother, and her mental illness.
Lorelei’s own mother suffered from mental illness and when Lorelei learns of her mother’s breakdown and illegal abortion, she goes on a quest to better understand her as a parent. Lorelei soon discovers her life is paralleling Plath’s and she panics about her fate. During her quest, she meets up with an old friend of her mother’s, Joanne, who gives her a secret, unpublished manuscript that her college friend, Sylvia Plath, sent her before her death. It is a continuation of the story of Esther Greenwood, Plath’s protagonist from The Bell Jar. Lorelei learns many secrets from the Plath manuscript which both hurt her and makes her hopeful for her own future. |
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“An elegantly-crafted and brave tale of the struggle of the artist against betrayal, madness, and myth. Haunted throughout by the legacy of Sylvia Plath, The Beekeeper’s Daughter mingles fact and fiction, past and present, into a story that you won’t want to put down.” — Danny Goldberg, author of Serving the Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain
“In The Beekeeper’s Daughter, Jessica Stilling deftly intertwines the stories of Lorelei (a writer and teacher recovering from a deep betrayal), her difficult and compelling mother, the poet Sylvia Plath, and a mysterious manuscript, showing how secrets, sorrow, pain, and love in its multiplicity of guises can echo and reverberate. Stilling’s insightful connections, imagery-rich prose, and compassionate exploration of her characters will stay with you long after this novel ends.” — Kate Angus, author of So Late to the Party
“In The Beekeeper’s Daughter, Jessica Stilling deftly intertwines the stories of Lorelei (a writer and teacher recovering from a deep betrayal), her difficult and compelling mother, the poet Sylvia Plath, and a mysterious manuscript, showing how secrets, sorrow, pain, and love in its multiplicity of guises can echo and reverberate. Stilling’s insightful connections, imagery-rich prose, and compassionate exploration of her characters will stay with you long after this novel ends.” — Kate Angus, author of So Late to the Party
“IT IS NO night to drown in:/A full moon, river lapsing/Black beneath bland mirror-sheen.” I hear Plath again. That poem my mother used to half sing before bed, at the dinner table, any time her mind wandered. I hear it in the back of my mind as I watch the ocean off of Cape Cod and consider swimming too far out. Slipping further, there’s always a moment when I might just drown, just . . . let it happen.
They let Barry Larsen out of prison last week. It took a while for the letter, an official-looking piece of paper stamped with the crest of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, to come but I knew he might get parole. It’s only some-of-my-business, maybe, in some circumstances, it’s none-of-my-business and I have tried to keep my distance since we’re still basically strangers.
I remember the day I learned his daughter, Heather, had been killed. It was a week after I’d found out about her affair with my husband. In that time I’d kicked Theo out of our home. I’d tried to ignore Heather, who was one of my English 201: Introduction to Modernism students at the college where I teach. I’d tried to stick my head in the sand I was so angry at the two of them and then I’d found out Heather had died, her cousin had beaten her to death and her father had given him the keys to the warehouse where he did it. After that there was no room for my anger. No room for anything but sorrow and guilt and I kept my distance from Heather and her family, knowing that was what they’d want.
Tonight all I can hear as I stare out at the ocean, at Cape Cod, is this damned Sylvia Plath poetry my mother used to whisper to me when I couldn’t sleep. I look out at the ocean just past the waves breaking. When they’re breaking they might bring you in. It’s when they stop, when they remain calm a long way out, that’s when you know you’ve gone too far. That’s when to worry.
“The blue water-mists dropping/Scrim after scrim like fishnets/Though fishermen are sleeping.” The Lorelei, “Lorelei,” a Sylvia Plath poem I loved as a child because we shared the name. My mother loved the poem as well. She’d been one of those post seventies feminists in the early eighties and my father always said she used to walk around the house on Cape Cod, her belly a great round mound, “like the moon, she used to say, but I think she got that from somewhere,” my father once told me. She’d walk around singing this Plath poem to me. “Lorelei, The Lorelei,” she’d say. “A woman who could control men with a single gaze. She’d just look at them and they’d fall in love with her. Such raw power. A woman needs that.” She was older when she had me, in her late thirties. She was not supposed to be able to get pregnant, she used to say. I was her little miracle, she’d continue on her good days. On her bad days all her words were poison and she’d spit them with such vitriol that it took me into my adulthood to truly come to turns with the things she said.
I used to swim when I was younger. A little girl growing up in Waltham, Massachusetts I was on the swim team. The breaststroke was my favorite, not that it wasn’t everyone’s, it really is very simple, just what you think when you think about swimming up and down, up and down, none of this crawling, this butterflying. As a child I always wondered if I swam fast enough could I fool the gods. Would they let me see that spot between time and space, where the sky and the ocean meet?
Once my mother went too far out. We were swimming together at the beach near nightfall. We shouldn’t have been out. The lifeguards had already told us to come in but we stayed a few minutes longer bobbing in the water together. “Watch this,” she said and she just started swimming, doing the crawl along the tiny waves until I couldn’t see her anymore. I treaded water as long as I could, waiting for her to come back. I was twelve years old, I felt like I was in the middle of the ocean out there and she just kept going. She went under, I didn’t see her come back up. By then I knew my mother’s antics. Sometimes she’d run and hide in the house and wouldn’t come out even when I called for her for an hour, even when I started crying. Sometimes she wouldn’t get out of bed for days. Losing her in the ocean, another perfectly fine place to hide, was not beyond my mother, and at twelve I already knew this. Yet I called out to her as the water lapped over my head and I went under. The current had its great fist at my ankle and I barely pulled myself up. I crawled to shore, stroke after stroke waves beating over my head, and I felt like I was falling. My mother didn’t come back. I sat on the beach and waited for her. If I were older I would have run for help but I just sat there stunned. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what to do it’s that just then I couldn’t move. Eventually she came out covered in seaweed. She’d crawled out a few feet back and I hadn’t seen her in the dark. But she came up to me looking like some Creature From the Black Lagoon, put her hand on my shoulder and motioned toward the house.
It was time to go back.
My mother did things like that. As a child I did not question them.
No night to drown . . . Oh Sylvia! She was so much like my mother.
They let Barry Larsen out of prison last week. It took a while for the letter, an official-looking piece of paper stamped with the crest of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, to come but I knew he might get parole. It’s only some-of-my-business, maybe, in some circumstances, it’s none-of-my-business and I have tried to keep my distance since we’re still basically strangers.
I remember the day I learned his daughter, Heather, had been killed. It was a week after I’d found out about her affair with my husband. In that time I’d kicked Theo out of our home. I’d tried to ignore Heather, who was one of my English 201: Introduction to Modernism students at the college where I teach. I’d tried to stick my head in the sand I was so angry at the two of them and then I’d found out Heather had died, her cousin had beaten her to death and her father had given him the keys to the warehouse where he did it. After that there was no room for my anger. No room for anything but sorrow and guilt and I kept my distance from Heather and her family, knowing that was what they’d want.
Tonight all I can hear as I stare out at the ocean, at Cape Cod, is this damned Sylvia Plath poetry my mother used to whisper to me when I couldn’t sleep. I look out at the ocean just past the waves breaking. When they’re breaking they might bring you in. It’s when they stop, when they remain calm a long way out, that’s when you know you’ve gone too far. That’s when to worry.
“The blue water-mists dropping/Scrim after scrim like fishnets/Though fishermen are sleeping.” The Lorelei, “Lorelei,” a Sylvia Plath poem I loved as a child because we shared the name. My mother loved the poem as well. She’d been one of those post seventies feminists in the early eighties and my father always said she used to walk around the house on Cape Cod, her belly a great round mound, “like the moon, she used to say, but I think she got that from somewhere,” my father once told me. She’d walk around singing this Plath poem to me. “Lorelei, The Lorelei,” she’d say. “A woman who could control men with a single gaze. She’d just look at them and they’d fall in love with her. Such raw power. A woman needs that.” She was older when she had me, in her late thirties. She was not supposed to be able to get pregnant, she used to say. I was her little miracle, she’d continue on her good days. On her bad days all her words were poison and she’d spit them with such vitriol that it took me into my adulthood to truly come to turns with the things she said.
I used to swim when I was younger. A little girl growing up in Waltham, Massachusetts I was on the swim team. The breaststroke was my favorite, not that it wasn’t everyone’s, it really is very simple, just what you think when you think about swimming up and down, up and down, none of this crawling, this butterflying. As a child I always wondered if I swam fast enough could I fool the gods. Would they let me see that spot between time and space, where the sky and the ocean meet?
Once my mother went too far out. We were swimming together at the beach near nightfall. We shouldn’t have been out. The lifeguards had already told us to come in but we stayed a few minutes longer bobbing in the water together. “Watch this,” she said and she just started swimming, doing the crawl along the tiny waves until I couldn’t see her anymore. I treaded water as long as I could, waiting for her to come back. I was twelve years old, I felt like I was in the middle of the ocean out there and she just kept going. She went under, I didn’t see her come back up. By then I knew my mother’s antics. Sometimes she’d run and hide in the house and wouldn’t come out even when I called for her for an hour, even when I started crying. Sometimes she wouldn’t get out of bed for days. Losing her in the ocean, another perfectly fine place to hide, was not beyond my mother, and at twelve I already knew this. Yet I called out to her as the water lapped over my head and I went under. The current had its great fist at my ankle and I barely pulled myself up. I crawled to shore, stroke after stroke waves beating over my head, and I felt like I was falling. My mother didn’t come back. I sat on the beach and waited for her. If I were older I would have run for help but I just sat there stunned. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what to do it’s that just then I couldn’t move. Eventually she came out covered in seaweed. She’d crawled out a few feet back and I hadn’t seen her in the dark. But she came up to me looking like some Creature From the Black Lagoon, put her hand on my shoulder and motioned toward the house.
It was time to go back.
My mother did things like that. As a child I did not question them.
No night to drown . . . Oh Sylvia! She was so much like my mother.
Book Clubs & Reading Groups Discussion Guide
| The Beekeeper's Daughter Reading Guide |
From the author
This book was in me for a while. After I read The Bell Jar and learned that Plath had written another novel about Esther that she’d destroyed and that people thought there was at least another novel out there that Ted Hughes never let see the light of day, I started considering the idea of continuing Esther’s story on my own. For the longest time that’s all I knew, that I wanted to do some kind of continuation of The Bell Jar but I wasn’t sure how it would work. Ideas come slowly sometimes. They percolate, they simmer, you have to wait for them to truly form. But I continued to think about this idea for years. And I knew someday the story would come to me and I would write it. I just wasn’t sure how right away. Would it be an interlocking narrative like Cunningham’s The Hours or a retelling or continuation like The Wide Sargasso Sea?
After a trip to Cape Cod the idea for Lorelei started to take shape. I did more research on Plath and her life there and as I was doing it Lorelei and her story started to come into focus and become a part of the novel. Then I decided that Plath should have a narrative voice in the book and I started to wonder about what time in Plath’s life I’d like to write about. At first I thought maybe I’d write about when she was a child growing up near Cape Cod, like Lorelei, then I thought maybe her time in New York, like The Bell Jar. I read many different Plath biographies while writing this. When I got to the end of the biography, to the part when she moves into Yeats’ house, something clicked. I knew that this was the time in her life I needed to write about—the horrible London winter after her divorce that led to her suicide. It was dark, but that time really spoke to me. The novel emerged from there. I saw it very clearly but at the same time it took about two years of just thinking about it, doing a little research but just thinking about it, before it became something clear I could start working on.
This book was in me for a while. After I read The Bell Jar and learned that Plath had written another novel about Esther that she’d destroyed and that people thought there was at least another novel out there that Ted Hughes never let see the light of day, I started considering the idea of continuing Esther’s story on my own. For the longest time that’s all I knew, that I wanted to do some kind of continuation of The Bell Jar but I wasn’t sure how it would work. Ideas come slowly sometimes. They percolate, they simmer, you have to wait for them to truly form. But I continued to think about this idea for years. And I knew someday the story would come to me and I would write it. I just wasn’t sure how right away. Would it be an interlocking narrative like Cunningham’s The Hours or a retelling or continuation like The Wide Sargasso Sea?
After a trip to Cape Cod the idea for Lorelei started to take shape. I did more research on Plath and her life there and as I was doing it Lorelei and her story started to come into focus and become a part of the novel. Then I decided that Plath should have a narrative voice in the book and I started to wonder about what time in Plath’s life I’d like to write about. At first I thought maybe I’d write about when she was a child growing up near Cape Cod, like Lorelei, then I thought maybe her time in New York, like The Bell Jar. I read many different Plath biographies while writing this. When I got to the end of the biography, to the part when she moves into Yeats’ house, something clicked. I knew that this was the time in her life I needed to write about—the horrible London winter after her divorce that led to her suicide. It was dark, but that time really spoke to me. The novel emerged from there. I saw it very clearly but at the same time it took about two years of just thinking about it, doing a little research but just thinking about it, before it became something clear I could start working on.
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Discussion Questions
1.How does the theme of the role of mental illness in the life of a woman take shape in the novel? Does it show a change in the way women were treated from Plath’s time (the 1950s) to the present when we are introduced to Joanne’s character? 2. How does the ocean (or the sea) work as a metaphor throughout the story? How might the image of Stonehenge in Esther Greenwood’s story accomplish the same things? 3. How are the various men in this novel portrayed? From Ted Hughes to Esther’s Tom, to Lorelei’s ex-husband Theo, to her boyfriend Eamon ,we meet many different kinds of men who have many kinds of relationships with women. Are there any consistent themes or personality traits portrayed? How might they influence the outcome of the novel? 4. During the final section of Esther Greenwood’s story she narrates, “And what was art, any art, but a byproduct of damage, of pain and loss so unimaginable? . . . and what kind of pain had the creator of the ocean felt as He made the waves so violent they trekked across the sea pummeling rocks and sea creatures, entire mountain ranges in their wake? What kind of pain had the makers of Stonehenge felt? What were they looking for, what did they need to know so badly they had to pull stones from the sea and drag them hundreds of miles?” How is the role of art and the creative process shown to affect an artist’s life in this novel? 5. How is the marriage of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Path portrayed in this novel? 6. What impact does seeing Stonehenge have upon Esther Greenwood’s character? Can you pinpoint the moment when things start to change for her? 7. Can you pinpoint a moment when Lorelei’s life goes wrong? What is it for you? Why? 8. Throughout the novel Lorelei has a close group of friends Amelia, Eamon, her aunt Sarah and Joanne, to fall back on. Sylvia Plath seems very much alone (though a few friends look in on her). What role does friendship and familial ties play in the mental health of a woman going through a trying time in this novel? 9. Lorelei learns of a secret, illegal abortion that her mother had before she was born when she reads her mother’s journal. How does this impact the story? Why might the author have chosen to portray an abortion in this way? 10. At the end of the novel Lorelei walks into the sea. It is left ambiguous what happens next. Do you think she goes too far? Does she come back? Why do you think this? |
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