There is a tradition in Plath criticism of interpreting the relationship between the texts on the recto and the verso of Plath's manuscript drafts. Plath wrote several poems in 1962, most of them Ariel poems, on the verso of her drafts of The Bell Jar. Lynda Bundzten calls this ‘back talking’ to the text on the other side of the page, Susan van Dyne suggests ‘a desire for sympathetic magic’, and Tracy Brain speaks of the texts ‘bleeding through the page’. Although all these critics tacitly acknowledge as much, it must be clearly stated that interpretations of Plath's motivation in writing a given text on the verso of the draft of another are a matter of speculation. More reliable an investigation is one that has not yet been undertaken, that of the relationship between the poetry and the fiction that Plath wrote at the same time. There are few periods in Plath's life when she was not working on both kinds of text. In this chapter, I ask what light is shed on Plath's fiction by an examination of the poetry she was writing at the same time, and vice versa. I also examine the relationship between the works in which she explores similar concerns in both poetry and fiction.