Frieda Hughes, Sylvia Plath's daughter and literary executor, didn't allow the producers to access to her mother's poetry. She also publicly denounced the project in a published poem of her own.
In January 2004, British newspaper "The Guardian" ran an article on this movie by author Al Alvarez (played by Jared Harris). In his own words, Harris had visited him before filming started "to talk to me about it or, rather, to study me while we talked and check me out for mannerisms and tone of voice", and he had been allowed to visit the set at Shepperton studios. Alvarez was positive about Gwyneth Paltrow's performance and the re-creation of 1950s Britain, but lukewarm about this movie overall, and offended by the way the script represented him: "the scriptwriter has me telling Ted that Sylvia has made a pass at me. Treachery posing as confession and gossip may be the lifeblood of soap opera, but in the real world, friends don't behave like that."
Blythe Danner, Gwyneth Paltrow's real life mother, plays Aurelia Plath, Sylvia's mother. Danner and Paltrow starred together in Cruel Doubt (1992), but not as mother and daughter.
Ian McMillan, reviewing this movie for the BBC, was particularly scathing about the scene in which Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, boating down a river, recite Geoffrey Chaucer to a herd of cows, calling it "A caricature of a poet's life". Several biographies of Plath mention the incident.
Most of the extras in the opening scenes in Cambridge were University of Cambridge students.