A goose has chosen to nest on our island, Innisfree. Her mate patrols the area waters and vigorously defends her domain. We studiously avoid her, veering off the path, around the maple tree, to slip our kayaks into the bright water.

An avid birder, though inexpert, I am not fond of geese. They are the grackles of waterfowl, in my estimation, and I would shoo a mass of them away as readily as I do the squirrels from my tulip beds. But this one nuclear family seems harmless enough, and my husband has bonded with them, so we live peaceably nearby.

Mother goose sits on her nest day in, day out, often motionless for hours at a time. She has no outside demands on her time, and her mate seems to oblige her single-mindedness. Her life is perfectly suited to her goal, which is a healthy hatchling.

Her human counterpart has a harder row to hoe. I thought this was common knowledge in the new millennium, after the convulsions of feminism in the late 20th century brought us all into a new world peopled with whole human beings, not parts of a whole, serving the family. Apparently, I was wrong. Recently I attended a writer’s talk at The New York Public Library that made me painfully aware of how far back we have fallen into the pre-feminist abyss.

The subject was the newly released “Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath,” edited by Karen V. Kukil. The panel included a male writer, J.D. McClatchy, who betrayed his ignorance of the female condition with a dismissive comment about Plath’s voluble agonizing as a “period dilemna,” as if that sort of thing (the struggle to raise a family and have a career or profession) couldn’t happen now.

Plath is not a great example of a happy homemaker, though her journals betray the joy she felt baking a lemon cake, setting a table or shaping a meal for her family. Her inner turmoil was less a product of the pre-feminist condition than of a profound clinical depression that eventually led to her suicide. Unfortunately, for many, her suicide has become her legacy more than her work.

Her work was impressive for its genius as well as its sheer volume. To me, the beauty of the journals is that they unveil the importance of the banal aspects of domesticity in a woman’s life, even a woman whose work overshadows her domestic prowess. The panel at the library seemed to want to hide this aspect of Plath. Cynthia Ozick, a poet who is now about the age Plath would be, had she lived, dismissed the journals finally as “pure smoke,” contending that “… in the end, all that matters is the work.”

Only Deborah Garrison, a younger writer on the panel, seemed to get the importance of Plath’s everyday writing, and everyday struggle. She understood that the writer was not writing for us in these pages, but because she had to, and that in them was the whole picture of a tormented woman, grappling with dinner, children, depression, ghosts, fears, sex, husband, and doing it all every day, day in, day out with a fierce power, a ferocious gift.

The high art priests and priestesses don’t want to hear about the joys of lemon cake, or a pressed shirt, but they inform her work as much as her tortured relationship with her father, or the writings of Locke, or anything high-brow or acceptably literary. Plath would be 68 this year. If she had been born 30 years later, would her struggle have been easier? I doubt it. Though modern anti-depressants may have been better able to treat her clinically, the challenge of balancing a professional life with the consuming demands of motherhood is still with us. Then, at least, the professional woman was seen as an anomaly. Today, we are expected to perform both tasks equally. To sit on the nest, and swim, at once.