Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath / Daddy

Sylvia Plath / Event
Sylvia Plath / Strumpet Song
Sylvia Plath / The ColossusAnne Sexton / Sylvia's Death

ylvia Plath / 50 years later and the same bitter arguments rage on
Sylvia Plath in New York / 'Pain, parties and work'

Frieda Hughes / ‘I felt my parents were stolen’

Ariel by Sylvia Plath / Review

The 100 best nonfiction books / No 17 / Ariel by Sylvia Plath (1965)

The 100 best nonfiction books / No 4 / Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes (1998)

Kirsten Dunst to direct The Bell Jar starring Dakota Fanning

The 100 best novels / No 85 / The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
Sylvia Plath / The Bell Jar / Review
Food in books / The crab, avocado and mayonnaise in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar

Ted Hughes / The Unauthorised Life by Jonathan Bate review / Sex and self‑deception

Sylvia Plath / Reflections on her legacy

Reflections on her legacy / Sylvia Plath by Jennifer Egan
Reflections on her legacy / Sylvia Plath by Sharon Olds

Reflections on her legacy / Sylvia Plath by Jeanette Winterson
Reflections on her legacy / Sylvia Plath by Lionel Shriver
Reflections on her legacy / Sylvia Plath by Margaret Drabble
Reflections on her legacy / Sylvia Plath by Kate Moses
Reflections on her legacy / Sylvia Plath by Sarah Churchwell

Sylvia Plath

October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963

US poet and novelist whose powerful, highly personal poems, often expressing a sense of desolation, are distinguished by their intensity and sharp imagery. Her Collected Poems 1981 was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Other collections of her poems include The Colossus 1960 and Ariel 1965, published after her death. Her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar 1961 deals with the events surrounding a young woman’s emotional breakdown.

         Plath was born during the Great Depression on October 27, 1932 at the Massachusetts Memorial Hospital in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. In April 1935, Plath's brother Warren was born^] and in 1936 the family moved to Winthrop, Massachusetts. Her Father Otto Plath died on November 5, 1940, a week and a half after Plath's eighth birthday, of complications following the amputation of a foot due to untreated diabetes. In 1950, Plath attended Smith College and excelled academically. She edited The Smith Review and during the summer after her third year of college Plath was awarded a coveted position as guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine, during which she spent a month in New York City.The experience was not what she had hoped it would be, and it began a downward spiral. Many of the events that took place during that summer were later used as inspiration for her novel The Bell Jar. Plath was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge University, England. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956 and they lived together first in the United States and then England, having two children together: Frieda and Nicholas.  She committed suicide while living in London.

         The nurse was due to arrive at nine o'clock the morning of 11 February 1963 to help Plath with the care of her children. Upon arrival, she could not get into the flat, but eventually gained access with the help of a workman, Charles Langridge. They found Plath dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in the kitchen, with her head in the oven, having sealed the rooms between herself and her sleeping children with wet towels and cloths. At approximately 4:30 am, Plath had placed her head in the oven, with the gas turned on. She was 30.

Dictionary of the Arts

New York, Gramercy Books, 1994

Sylvia Plath

On October 27, 1932, Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother, Aurelia Schober, was a master’s student at Boston University when she met Plath’s father, Otto Plath, who was her professor. They were married in January of 1932. Otto taught both German and biology, with a focus on apiology, the study of bees.

        In 1940, when Sylvia was eight years old, her father died as a result of complications from diabetes. He had been a strict father, and both his authoritarian attitudes and his death drastically defined her relationships and her poems—most notably in her elegaic and infamous poem, "Daddy".

           Even in her youth, Plath was ambitiously driven to succeed. She kept a journal from the age of 11 and published her poems in regional magazines and newspapers. Her first national publication was in the Christian Science Monitor in 1950, just after graduating from high school.

          In 1950, Plath matriculated at Smith College. She was an exceptional student, and despite a deep depression she went through in 1953 and a subsequent suicide attempt, she managed to graduate summa cum laude in 1955.

        After graduation, Plath moved to Cambridge, England, on a Fulbright Scholarship. In early 1956, she attended a party and met the English poet, Ted Hughes. Shortly thereafter, Plath and Hughes were married, on June 16, 1956.

        Plath returned to Massachusetts in 1957, and began studying with Robert Lowell. Her first collection of poems, Colossus, was published in 1960 in England, and two years later in the United States. She returned to England where she gave birth to the couple's two children, Frieda and Nicholas Hughes, in 1960 and 1962, respectively.

        In 1962, Ted Hughes left Plath for Assia Gutmann Wevill. That winter, in a deep depression, Plath wrote most of the poems that would comprise her most famous book, Ariel.

      
         In 1963, Plath published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Then, on February 11, 1963, during one of the worst English winters on record, Plath wrote a note to her downstairs neighbor instructing him to call the doctor, then she committed suicide using her gas oven.

      Plath’s poetry is often associated with the Confessional movement, and compared to poets such as her teacher, Robert Lowell, and fellow student Anne Sexton. Often, her work is singled out for the intense coupling of its violent or disturbed imagery and its playful use of alliteration and rhyme.

          Although only Colossus was published while she was alive, Plath was a prolific poet, and in addition to Ariel, Hughes published three other volumes of her work posthumously, including The Collected Poems, which was the recipient of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. She was the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize after death.

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Poetry

The Colossus (1960)
Ariel (1965) 
Crossing the Water (1971) 
Winter Trees (1972) 
The Collected Poems (1981)

Prose

The Bell Jar (1963)
Letters Home (1975, to and edited by her mother)
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977)
The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982) 
The Magic Mirror (1989, Plath's Smith College senior thesis)
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000, edited by Karen V. Kukil)

Books for Young Readers

The Bed Book (1976) 
The It-Doesn't-Matter-Suit (1996) 
Collected Children's Stories (UK, 2001) 
Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen (2001)