Last reviewed: June 2017
American confessional poet and novelist
October 27, 1932
Boston, Massachusetts
February 11, 1963
London, England
Before her death in 1963, Sylvia Plath, through the eloquence of her autobiographical poetry, fiction, and prose, had established herself as one of the most promising writers of her generation and as one of the foremost modern interpreters of the female experience. Born in Boston on October 27, 1932, to Otto Emil Plath, a member of the Boston University faculty, and Aurelia Schober Plath, Sylvia was raised near the ocean in Winthrop, Massachusetts. Her stern father, whose presence haunts much of Plath’s writing, died in 1940. Two years later, Aurelia Plath moved herself, her two children, and her parents to Wellesley, Massachusetts, where she taught medical secretarial courses. There, Sylvia Plath established a brilliant academic record and exhibited talent both as an artist and as a writer, publishing her first short story in Seventeen magazine soon after finishing high school.
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Her academic and literary successes continued after her admission to Smith College in the fall of 1950. The recipient of several prestigious scholarships, she performed impressively in her college courses and published her works in several national magazines, earning, among other accolades, a summer guest editorship in New York City with Mademoiselle in 1953. Already subject to the anxieties of a perfectionist incapable of satisfying her own standards, a brilliant woman aware of the potential social penalties for her brilliance, and a daughter desirous of pleasing a zealously selfless mother, Plath found her New York City experiences both fascinating and confusing. Returning emotionally drained to her life in Massachusetts, she entered a period of deep depression, ultimately attempting suicide and undergoing hospital treatment for severe psychiatric problems. The nightmare of her breakdown later became the material for her novel The Bell Jar, published under a pseudonym in 1963, shortly before her death. Grave of Sylvia Plath
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Despite her collapse, Plath returned to Smith College, graduating summa cum laude in June of 1955. For the next two years, she studied as a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Cambridge, during which time she met and married British poet Ted Hughes. While dedicating much effort to her husband’s poetic career and to preparation for her own university examinations, she continued to write and publish both poetry and short fiction.
Following the successful completion of her course of study in England, Plath moved with Hughes to Massachusetts, and while she taught English courses to Smith College freshmen for a year, both writers attempted to advance their literary careers. Finding that the many hours she expended in her teaching frustrated her need to write, Plath resigned her position, and she and Hughes lived for several months in Boston. There Plath participated in the poetry workshops of Robert Lowell, and she and her husband continued to write and publish.
In December of 1959, after a short period of travel and a fruitful several weeks at a writers’ retreat at Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York, the couple took up residence in London, where they had a daughter, Frieda Rebecca Hughes, in April, 1960. Later that year, Plath’s first book of poetry, The Colossus, and Other Poems, was published by William Heinemann, with little immediate critical reaction. Overshadowed by her already successful husband, burdened by her roles of mother and helpmate, and plagued by health problems (including a miscarriage and an appendectomy in February of 1961), Plath experienced a period of depression and self-doubt that several professional successes and a new outburst of creativity, particularly the writing of a portion of The Bell Jar, went far to dissipate.
The family’s move to Devon in September of 1961 temporarily improved matters, and her work on an American poetry anthology, the publication of an American edition of her first book, and the acceptance of her short poetic drama Three Women for presentation by the British Broadcasting Corporation all boded well for her professional future. Unfortunately, following the birth of her second child, Nicholas Farrar Hughes, in January, 1962, marital problems developed, and within a few months, Plath and Hughes had separated. After another productive year and a final move back to London, Plath again fell into deep depression. On February 11, 1963, she took her own life.
Although there were fervent admirers of her work before her death, the rise in Plath’s reputation has largely been a posthumous phenomenon. That is hardly surprising, as much of her best writing became available only after her suicide, and The Bell Jar, the lightly disguised account of her own troubled coming-of-age, appeared for the first time under her name in 1966. The previous year, Ariel, a volume of many of the most eloquent of the poems of the last months of her life, had been published to a chorus of high critical praise, and in 1971, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees appeared. Several of her children's stories were found and put into print in ensuing decades. Collections of her letters, her journal entries, and miscellaneous other writings have also been published, and The Collected Poems, arranged and edited by Ted Hughes, received the 1982 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. In 2004, Ariel was republished using the selection and arrangement of poems, as well as notes, that Plath herself wanted, as opposed to the choices that Hughes made for the initial posthumous publication of the collection. Frieda Plath penned the introduction to the new facsimile edition, highlighting the differences between the 1965 and 2004 editions.
What these various, carefully crafted volumes reveal is a woman of great sensitivity and lively intellect who was simultaneously aware of the joys and psychic terrors of earthly existence and for whom, despite extraordinary reserves of creative vitality, death was often more fascinating than life. They also show a woman struggling to cope with her several socially defined roles as a giving woman (daughter, lover, wife, mother) and with her contradictory human needs for independent selfhood and individual achievement. The tensions between the lure of life and the lure of death and the need to fulfill the expectations of others and the need to fulfill the demands of self are pervasive in Plath’s diverse literary output.