Sylvia Plath

Early life and education Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath (1906–1994), was the American-born daughter of Austrian immigrants, and her father, Otto Plath (1885–1940), was from Grabow in Prussia, German Empire. Plath's father was an entomologist and a professor of biology at Boston University who wrote a book about bumblebees in 1934. On April 27, 1935, Plath's brother Warren Joseph was born. Since 1920, Plath's maternal grandparents, the Schobers, had lived in a section of Winthrop called Point Shirley, a location mentioned in Plath's poetry. Based on her poetry and journals, the power dynamic between Plath’s parents was characterized by a strict, patriarchal structure in which her father, Otto Plath, held absolute authority, while her mother, Aurelia Plath, was perceived as a subservient yet ultimately managing figure. Seen in Plath’s work, particularly “Daddy”, presents this dynamic as a source of deep emotional trauma where her father is viewed as an oppressive “god” and her mother as a passive figure. Otto Plath died on November 5, 1940, a week and a half after his daughter's eighth birthday, Plath published her first poem at the age of eight in the Boston Heralds children's section. Over the next few years, Plath published multiple poems in regional magazines and newspapers. At age 11, Plath began keeping a journal. Just after graduating from high school, she had her first national publication in The Christian Science Monitor. The experience was not what she had hoped for, and many of the events that took place during that summer were later used as inspiration for her novel The Bell Jar. She was furious at not being at a meeting that Mademoiselle editor Cyrilly Abels had arranged with Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, a writer whose work she loved, according to one of her boyfriends, "more than life itself". She loitered around the White Horse Tavern and the Chelsea Hotel for two days, hoping to meet Thomas, but he was already on his way home. A few weeks later, she slashed her legs "to see if she had enough courage to kill herself." During this time, she was not accepted into a Harvard University writing seminar with author Frank O'Connor. by crawling under the front porch and taking her mother's sleeping pills. She survived this first suicide attempt, later writing that she "blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion". She spent the next six months in psychiatric care, receiving more electric and insulin shock treatment under the care of Ruth Beuscher. According to Plath's biographer Andrew Wilson, Olive Higgins Prouty "would take Dr. Tillotson to task for the badly managed ECT, blaming him for Sylvia's suicide attempt". She obtained a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College, one of the two women-only colleges of the University of Cambridge in England, where she lived in Whitstead, a detached house situated on the edge of the college grounds. Plath continued actively writing poetry and publishing her work in the student newspaper Varsity. At Newnham, she studied with Dorothea Krook, whom she held in high regard. She spent her first-year winter and spring holidays traveling around Europe. Plath describes how she met Hughes: Plath described Hughes as "a singer, story-teller, lion and world-wanderer" with "a voice like the thunder of God". In June 1957, Plath and Hughes moved to the United States; beginning in September, Plath taught at Smith College, her alma mater. She found it difficult to both teach and have enough time and energy to write, and in the middle of 1958, the couple moved to Boston, where they lived at 9 Willow St. in Beacon Hill. Plath took a job as a receptionist in the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital and in the evenings attended a creative writing seminar given by poet Robert Lowell (also attended by the writers Anne Sexton and George Starbuck). Their daughter Frieda Rebecca was born on April 1, 1960, and in October, Plath published The Colossus, her first collection of poetry. In August, she finished her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar; immediately afterwards, the family moved to Court Green in the small market town of North Tawton, Devon. Her son Nicholas Farrar was born on January 17, 1962. Before moving away from London in August 1961, the couple sublet their flat at Chalcot Square to the Canadian poet David Wevill and his wife Assia (née Gutmann) Wevill. The couples became friends and Plath and Hughes invited the Wevills to visit them at their new house in Devon in May 1962. Hughes was immediately struck with Assia, as she was with him. In July 1962, Plath discovered Hughes was having an affair with Wevill. In September, as a last attempt to save their relationship, Plath and Hughes traveled to Cleggan in Ireland to visit the poet Richard Murphy; the trip ended in disaster, with Hughes abandoning Plath and disappearing to London to see Assia. The pair then embarked on a ten-day trip to Spain, where Plath and Hughes previously spent their honeymoon. In October, Plath and Hughes separated for good, and Hughes moved back to London, leaving Plath and their children behind in Devon. In December 1962, she returned alone to London with their children and rented, on a five-year lease, a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road—around the corner from her previous flat at Chalcot Square. William Butler Yeats once lived in the house, which bears an English Heritage blue plaque for the Irish poet. Plath was pleased by this fact and considered it a good omen. The winter of 1962–1963 was one of the coldest on record in the UK; the pipes froze, the children—now two years old and nine months—were often sick, and the house had no telephone. Her depression returned but she kept on writing poetry, which would be published after her death. Her only novel, The Bell Jar, was published in January 1963 under the pen name Victoria Lucas, to protect the identities of the real people the characters were based on and Plath herself in case of poor reception. The Bell Jar was met with critical indifference. On August 24, 1953, she overdosed on sleeping pills. In June 1962, she drove her car off the side of the road into a nearby clearing after learning about Hughes' and Wevill's affair. The poetry critic and Plath's friend Al Alvarez always maintained that Plath told him it was a suicide attempt, but another friend claimed that Plath herself described the incident as "not a conscious suicide but a blind destructive urge over which she had no conscious control" and Hughes himself told Alvarez that it was a minor accident due to a "feverish blackout". In January 1963, Plath spoke with John Horder, her general practitioner. She described the current depressive episode she was experiencing; it had been ongoing for six or seven months. While for most of the time she had been able to continue working, her depression had worsened and become severe, "marked by constant agitation, suicidal thoughts and inability to cope with daily life." Plath struggled with insomnia, taking medication at night to induce sleep, and frequently woke up early. Several commentators have argued that because anti-depressants may take up to three weeks to take effect, her prescription from Horder would not have taken full effect prior to her death; however, others have pointed out that adverse effects of anti-depressants can begin immediately. Plath's intentions have been debated. That morning, she asked her downstairs neighbor, art historian Trevor Thomas (1907–1993), what time he would be leaving. She also left a note reading "Call Dr. Horder", including the doctor's phone number. It is argued Plath turned on the toxic coal gas oven at a time when Thomas would have been likely to see the note, but the escaping gas seeped downstairs and also rendered Thomas unconscious while he slept. However, in her biography Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath, Plath's friend Jillian Becker wrote, "According to Mr. Goodchild, a police officer attached to the coroner's office... [Plath] had thrust her head far into the gas oven... [and] had really meant to die." Horder also believed her intention was clear. He stated that "No one who saw the care with which the kitchen was prepared could have interpreted her action as anything but an irrational compulsion." Aftermath , West Yorkshire|alt=Flowers in front of a simple headstone bearing the inscription, "In memory Sylvia Plath Hughes 1932–1963 Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted." An inquest was held on February 15 and concluded that the cause of death was suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. Hughes was devastated; they had been separated for six months, due to his affair with Assia Wevill. In a letter to an old friend of Plath's from Smith College, he wrote: "That's the end of my life. The rest is posthumous." Wevill also committed suicide using a gas stove, six years later, in 1969. Plath's gravestone in Heptonstall's parish churchyard of St. Thomas the Apostle bears the inscription that Hughes chose for her: "Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted." Biographers have attributed the source of the quote to the 16th-century novel Journey to the West written by Wu Cheng'en. Eight years after the death of Plath, Al Alvarez wrote that Plath's suicide was not intentional and was "a cry for help which fatally misfired". Plath's daughter Frieda Hughes is a writer and artist, who has now released seven children’s books. She has no children and resides in Abermule, Powys, Wales. On March 16, 2009, Plath's son Nicholas Hughes, who was a fisheries biologist, died by suicide at his home in Fairbanks, Alaska, following a history of depression. Nicholas and Frieda shared a half-sibling: Shura Hughes, whose mother was Assia Wevill. Shura died at the age of four from a murder-suicide committed by her mother on the 23rd of March 1969. ==Works==

Plath wrote poetry from the age of 8, her first poem appearing in the Boston Herald. By the time she arrived at Smith College, she had written over 50 short stories, and her work had been published in numerous magazines. At Smith, she majored in English literature and won all the major prizes in writing and scholarship, including literary prizes for her poetry. Additionally, she received a summer editor position at the young women's magazine Mademoiselle. Alvarez clearly views Plath as part of a generation that helped establish a new artistic myth. In contrast to the Eliot generation, which championed the impersonality of art and the "extinction of personality" in creative expression, Plath and her contemporaries fused their inner lives with their artistic output. As Alvarez puts it, this is a form of art in which "the barriers between the artist’s work and his life are forever shifting and crumbling.” The Colossus The Colossus and Other Poems was Plath’s first book-length publication, released in October 1960 and in the US in 1962. It was the only volume of poetry published during her lifetime. While she had previously published many poems in magazines, this was her first bound collection. The collection contains 44 poems, including well-known pieces like “The Colossus” and “The Disquieting Muses”. The Colossus marked her debut in the literary world with a style that was heavily praised for its craft, even if it differed in tone from her later, most famous work. By the time Heinemann published her first collection, The Colossus and Other Poems in the UK in late 1960, Plath had been short-listed several times in the Yale Younger Poets book competition and had her work printed in ''Harper's, The Spectator and The Times Literary Supplement. All the poems in The Colossus had been printed in major U.S. and British journals, and she had a contract with The New Yorker. It is, however, her 1965 collection Ariel'', published posthumously, on which Plath's reputation essentially rests. "Often, her work is singled out for the intense coupling of its violent or disturbed imagery and its playful use of alliteration and rhyme." The Bell Jar Plath’s semi-autobiographical novel—her mother had tried to block its publication—was published under a pseudonym in the UK in 1963, under her real name in 1966, and in the US in 1971. The Bell Jar has sold over three million copies and in 1979 was produced into a film directed by Larry Peerce and staring Marilyn Hassett as ‘Esther’. Describing the compilation of the book to her mother, she wrote, "What I've done is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalizing to add color—it's a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when she is suffering a breakdown... I've tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar". She described her novel as "an autobiographical apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the past". The Bell Jar predominately focuses on the summer of her internship at ‘Mademoiselle’ as a guest editor. Plath dated a Yale senior named Dick Norton during her junior year. Norton, upon whom the character of Buddy in The Bell Jar is based, contracted tuberculosis and was treated at the Ray Brook Sanatorium. While visiting Norton, Plath broke her leg skiing, an incident that was fictionalized in the novel. Plath also used the novel to highlight the issue of women in the workforce during the 1950s. After her summer in the editorship, she was denied a place in Frank O’Connor’s summer writing class at Harvard. This sparked her mental decline, consequently leading to her first attempt of suicide by taking sleeping pills and barricading herself in the basement crawlspace. She strongly believed in women's abilities to be writers and editors while society forced them to fulfill secretarial roles: Now with me, writing is the first delight in life. I want time and money to write, both very necessary. I will not sacrifice my time to learn shorthand because I do not want any of the jobs which shorthand would open up, although those jobs are no doubt very interesting for girls who want them. I do not want the rigid hours of a magazine or publishing job. I do not want to type other people's letters and read their manuscripts. I want to type my own and write my own. So secretarial training is out for me. That I know. (Sylvia Plath's letter to her mother, 10 Feb 1955) Double Exposure In 1963, after The Bell Jar was published, Plath began working on another literary work, titled Double Exposure, which was never published. According to Ted Hughes in 1979, Plath left behind a typescript of "some 130 pages", but in 1995 he spoke of just "sixty, seventy pages". His sister, Olwyn Hughes, wrote in 2003 that the typescript may have consisted of the first two chapters, and did not exceed sixty pages. Ariel Plath's second volume of poems, titled Ariel, was published by Faber & Faber in 1965, two years after her death. Ted Hughes made substantial changes to the manuscript she left on her desk on the night of her death. He rearranged the intended order of the poems, dropping some pieces, and adding others. The publication precipitated Plath's rise to fame. The impact of Ariel was dramatic, with its dark and potentially autobiographical descriptions of mental illness in poems such as "Tulips", "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus". Plath's fellow confessional poet and friend Anne Sexton commented: "Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicide, in detail and in depth—between the free potato chips. Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem. Sylvia and I often talked opposites. We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric lightbulb, sucking on it. She told the story of her first suicide in sweet and loving detail, and her description in The Bell Jar is just that same story." The confessional interpretation of Plath's work has led to some dismissing certain aspects of her work as an exposition of sentimentalist melodrama; in 2010, for example, Theodore Dalrymple asserted that Plath had been the "patron saint of self-dramatisation" and of self-pity. Revisionist critics such as Tracy Brain have, however, argued against a tightly autobiographical interpretation of Plath's material. On January 16, 2004, The Independent published an article that ranked Ariel as the 3rd best book of modern poetry among 'The 10 Best Modern Poetry Books.' The same year, Faber published Ariel: The Restored Edition, with a foreword by Frieda Hughes. The new edition for the first time restored the selection and arrangement of the poems as Plath had left them. Hughes version of ‘Ariel’ showed the downfall of creativity into a mental spiral whereas literary sources believe Plath’s ‘Ariel’ was written with ‘love’ as the opener and ‘spring’ to close. The changes made by Hughes portray his desire for revenge after the death of Plath rather than admiration or grief. In 2004 “‘Ariel’ was restored and published by Harpercollins and included poems previously omitted by Hughes. Other works In 1971, the volumes Winter Trees and Crossing the Water were published in the UK, including nine previously unseen poems from the original manuscript of Ariel. Letters and journals Heavily abridged versions of Plath's letters to her family, mainly to her mother and brother, were published in 1975, edited and selected by her mother Aurelia Plath. The collection Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 came out partly in response to the strong public reaction to the publication of The Bell Jar in America. In 2017 and 2018, two new volumes of letters, The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume I: 1940-1956 and The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume II: 1956-1963, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil, were published by Faber. With more than 2.500 pages, both volumes contain complete and unabridged letters to her family, friends, mentors and teachers, ex-boyfriends and to Ted Hughes. Plath started writing in her diary on January 1, 1944, at the age of 11 and continued until her death by suicide in February 1963. Her early diaries remain unpublished and are currently at Indiana University Bloomington. Her adult diaries, starting from her first year at Smith College in 1950, were published in 1982 as The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Frances McCullough, with Ted Hughes as consulting editor. In 1982, when Smith College acquired Plath's remaining journals, Hughes sealed two of them until February 11, 2013, the 50th anniversary of Plath's death. During the last years of his life, Hughes began working on a fuller publication of Plath's journals. In 1998, shortly before his death, he unsealed the two journals, and passed the project onto his children by Plath, Frieda and Nicholas, who passed it on to Karen V. Kukil, who finished her editing in December 1999. In 2000 Anchor Books published The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. More than half of the new volume contained newly released material; the American author Joyce Carol Oates hailed the publication as a "genuine literary event". Hughes faced criticism for his role in handling the journals: He claims to have destroyed Plath's last journal, which contained entries from the winter of 1962 up to her death. In the foreword of the 1982 version, he writes "I destroyed [the last of her journals] because I did not want her children to have to read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival)." ==Hughes controversies==

As Hughes and Plath were legally married at the time of her death, Hughes inherited the Plath estate, including all her written work. He has been condemned repeatedly for burning Plath's last journal, saying he "did not want her children to have to read it". Hughes lost another journal and an unfinished novel, and instructed that a collection of Plath's papers and journals should not be released until 2013. He has been accused of attempting to control the estate for his own ends, although royalties from Plath's poetry were placed into a trust account for their two children, Frieda and Nicholas. Plath's gravestone has been repeatedly vandalized by those aggrieved that "Hughes" is written on the stone; they have attempted to chisel it off, leaving only the name "Sylvia Plath". Plath and Hughes's daughter Frieda has condemned the defacement. When Hughes's mistress Assia Wevill died by suicide and killed their four-year-old daughter Shura in 1969, this practice intensified, as Wevill's death led to claims that Hughes had been abusive to both Plath and Wevill. Outraged mourners accused Hughes in the media of dishonoring Plath's name by removing the stone. Radical feminist poet Robin Morgan published the poem "Arraignment", in which she openly accused Hughes of the battery and murder of Plath. Her book Monster (1972) "included a piece in which a gang of Plath aficionados are imagined castrating Hughes, stuffing his penis into his mouth and then blowing out his brains". Hughes threatened to sue Morgan. The book was withdrawn by the publisher Random House, but it remained in circulation among feminists. Other feminists threatened to kill Hughes in Plath's name and pursue a conviction for murder. Still the subject of speculation and opprobrium in 1998, Hughes published Birthday Letters that year, his own collection of 88 poems about his relationship with Plath. Hughes had published very little about his experience of the marriage and Plath's suicide, and the book caused a sensation, being taken as his first explicit disclosure, and it topped bestseller charts. It was not known at the volume's release that Hughes had terminal cancer and would die later that year. The book won the Forward Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. The poems, written after Plath's death, in some cases long after, try to find a reason why Plath killed herself. In October 2015, the BBC Two documentary Ted Hughes: Stronger Than Death examined Hughes's life and work; it included audio recordings of Plath reciting her own poetry. Their daughter Frieda spoke for the first time about her mother and father. ==Themes and legacy==

Sylvia Plath's early poems exhibit what became her typical imagery, using personal and nature-based depictions featuring, for example, the moon, blood, hospitals, fetuses, and skulls. They were mostly imitation exercises of poets she admired such as Dylan Thomas, W. B. Yeats and Marianne Moore. After 1960 her work moved into a more surreal landscape darkened by a sense of imprisonment and looming death, overshadowed by her father. The Colossus is filled with themes of death, redemption and resurrection. After Hughes left, Plath produced, in less than two months, the 40 poems of rage, despair, love, and vengeance on which her reputation mostly rests. It was the posthumous publication of Ariel in 1965 that precipitated Plath's rise to fame and helped establish her reputation as one of the 20th century's best poets. As soon as it was published, critics began to see the collection as the charting of Plath's increasing desperation or death wish. Her dramatic death became her most famous aspect and remains so. Smith College, Plath's alma mater, holds her literary papers in the Smith College Library. The United States Postal Service introduced a postage stamp featuring Plath in 2012. An English Heritage plaque records Plath's residence at 3 Chalcot Square, in London. In 2018, The New York Times published an obituary for Plath as part of the Overlooked history project. Portrayals in media Plath's voice is heard in a BBC documentary about her life, recorded in London in late 1962. Of the BBC recording Elizabeth Hardwick wrote: Letters Home is a 1986 experimental telefilm directed by Chantal Akerman in which Plath's letters to and from her mother are recited by Delphine Seyrig and Coralie Seyrig, with the latter taking on the role of Plath. It is an adaptation of Rose Leiman Goldemberg’s off-Broadway play. Gwyneth Paltrow portrayed Plath in the biopic Sylvia (2003). Elizabeth Sigmund, who was friends with both Plath and Hughes, criticized the movie for depicting Sylvia as "a permanent depressive and a possessive person", but she conceded that "the film has an atmosphere towards the end of her life which is heartbreaking in its accuracy". Frieda Hughes, who was only two years old when she lost her mother, was angered by the making of entertainment featuring her parents' troubled marriage and her mother's death. She accused the "peanut crunching" public of wanting to be titillated by her family's tragedies. In 2003, Frieda reacted to the situation in the poem "My Mother", first published in Tatler: Musical settings • In his Ariel: Five Poems of Sylvia Plath (1971), American composer Ned Rorem has set for soprano, clarinet and piano the poems "Words", "Poppies In July", "The Hanging Man", "Poppies In October", and "Lady Lazarus." • Also drawing from Ariel, in his Six Poems by Sylvia Plath for solo soprano (1975), German composer Aribert Reimann has set the poems "Edge", "Sheep In Fog", "The Couriers", "The Night Dances", and "Words." He later set "Lady Lazarus" (1992), also for solo soprano. • Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho's five-part From the Grammar of Dreams for soprano and mezzo a cappella (1988) is constructed on a collage of fragments from The Bell Jar and the poem "Paralytic." The piece was also arranged by the composer into a version for soprano and electronics (2002), in which the singer sings in interaction with a recorded double of her own voice. Albeit composed as a concert piece, From the Grammar of Dreams has also been staged. • American composer Juliana Hall's Lorelei (1989) for mezzo, horn, and piano is a setting of Plath's poem of the same name. Hall had previously set "The Night Dances" as a movement of her cycle for soprano and piano Night Dances (1987) featuring texts by five female poets, and went on to write a song cycle for soprano and piano entirely devoted to Plath, Crossing The Water (2011), which comprises the poems "Street Song", "Crossing The Water", "Rhyme", and "Alicante Lullaby." • In her cycle for soprano and piano The Blood Jet (2006), American composer Lori Laitman set the poems "Morning Song", "The Rival", "Kindness", and "Balloons." ==Publication list==

Poetry collections • The Colossus and Other Poems (1960, William Heinemann) • Ariel (1965, Faber & Faber) • Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices (1968, Turret Books) • Crossing the Water (1971, Faber & Faber) • Winter Trees (1971, Faber & Faber) • The Collected Poems (1981, Faber & Faber) • Selected Poems (1985, Faber & Faber) • Ariel: The Restored Edition (2004, Faber & Faber) • The Poems of Sylvia Plath, edited by Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil (forthcoming 2026, Faber & Faber) Collected prose and novels • The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" (novel, 1963, Heinemann) • Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 (1975, Harper & Row, US; Faber & Faber, UK) • Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts (1977, Faber & Faber) • The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough (1982, Dial Press) • The Magic Mirror (1989), Plath's Smith College senior thesis • The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil (2000, Anchor Books) • The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil (2017, Faber & Faber) • The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil (2018, Faber & Faber) • Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom (2019, Faber & Faber) • The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath, edited by Peter K. Steinberg (2024, Faber & Faber) Children's books • The Bed Book, illustrated by Quentin Blake (1976, Faber & Faber) • ''The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit'' (1996, Faber & Faber) • ''Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen'' (2001, Faber & Faber) • ''Collected Children's Stories'' (UK, 2001, Faber & Faber) ==See also==