Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts.[4][5] Her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath (1906–1994), was a second-generation American of Austrian descent, and her father, Otto Plath (1885–1940), was from Grabow, Germany.[6] Plath's father was an entomologist and a professor of biology at Boston University who wrote a book about bumblebees.[7]

On April 27, 1935, Plath's brother Warren was born.[5] In 1936 the family moved from 24 Prince Street in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, to 92 Johnson Avenue, Winthrop, Massachusetts.[8] Plath's mother, Aurelia, with Plath's maternal grandparents, the Schobers, had lived since 1920 in a section of Winthrop called Point Shirley, a location mentioned in Plath's poetry. While living in Winthrop, eight-year-old Plath published her first poem in the Boston Herald's children's section.[9] Over the next few years, Plath published multiple poems in regional magazines and newspapers.[10] At age 11, Plath began keeping a journal.[10] In addition to writing, she showed early promise as an artist, winning an award for her paintings from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in 1947.[11] "Even in her youth, Plath was ambitiously driven to succeed."[10]

Otto Plath died on November 5, 1940, a week and a half after Sylvia's eighth birthday,[7] of complications following the amputation of a foot due to untreated diabetes. He had become ill shortly after a close friend died of lung cancer. Comparing the similarities between his friend's symptoms and his own, Otto became convinced that he, too, had lung cancer and did not seek treatment until his diabetes had progressed too far. Raised as a Unitarian, Plath experienced a loss of faith after her father's death and remained ambivalent about religion throughout her life.[12] Her father was buried in Winthrop Cemetery in Massachusetts. A visit to her father's grave later prompted Plath to write the poem "Electra on Azalea Path".

After Otto's death, Aurelia moved her children and her parents to 26 Elmwood Road, Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1942.[7] Plath commented in "Ocean 1212-W", one of her final works, that her first nine years "sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth".[5][13] Plath attended Bradford Senior High School (now Wellesley High School) in Wellesley, graduating in 1950.[5] Just after graduating from high school, she had her first national publication in the Christian Science Monitor.[10]

Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts

In 1950, Plath attended Smith College, a private women's liberal arts college in Massachusetts. She excelled academically. While at Smith, she lived in Lawrence House, and a plaque can be found outside her old room. She edited The Smith Review. After her third year of college, Plath was awarded a coveted position as a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine, during which she spent a month in New York City.[5] 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.[14]

She was furious at not being at a meeting the editor had arranged with Welsh poet Dylan Thomas — a writer whom she loved, said one of her boyfriends, "more than life itself". She hung 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.[15][lower-alpha 1] During this time she was not accepted into a Harvard writing seminar with author Frank O'Connor.[5] Following ECT for depression, Plath made her first medically documented suicide attempt on August 24, 1953,[17] by crawling under the front porch and taking her mother's sleeping pills.[18]

Sidgwick Hall at Newnham College

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.[5] Her stay at McLean Hospital and her Smith Scholarship were paid for by Olive Higgins Prouty, who also recovered from a mental breakdown.[19] 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".[16]

Plath seemed to make a good recovery and returned to college. In January 1955, she submitted her thesis The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoyevsky's Novels, and in June graduated from Smith with an A.B., summa cum laude.[20] She was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society,[14] and had an IQ of around 160.[21][22]

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 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.[23] She spent her first year winter and spring holidays traveling around Europe.[5]

Plath's stay at McLean Hospital inspired her novel The Bell Jar

Plath met poet Ted Hughes on February 25, 1956. In a 1961 BBC interview (now held by the British Library Sound Archive),[24] Plath describes how she met Hughes:

I'd read some of Ted's poems in this magazine and I was very impressed and I wanted to meet him. I went to this little celebration and that's actually where we met...Then we saw a great deal of each other. Ted came back to Cambridge and suddenly we found ourselves getting married a few months later...We kept writing poems to each other. Then it just grew out of that, I guess, a feeling that we both were writing so much and having such a fine time doing it, we decided that this should keep on.[24]

Plath described Hughes as "a singer, story-teller, lion and world-wanderer" with "a voice like the thunder of God".[5]

The couple married on June 16, 1956, at St George the Martyr, Holborn in London (now in the Borough of Camden) with Plath's mother in attendance, and spent their honeymoon in Paris and Benidorm. Plath returned to Newnham in October to begin her second year.[5] During this time, they both became deeply interested in astrology and the supernatural, using ouija boards.[25]

In June 1957, Plath and Hughes moved to the United States, and from September, Plath taught at Smith College, her alma mater. She found it difficult to both teach and have enough time and energy to write,[20] and in the middle of 1958, the couple moved to Boston. Plath took a job as a receptionist in the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital and, in the evening sat in on creative writing seminars given by poet Robert Lowell (also attended by the writers Anne Sexton and George Starbuck).[20]

Both Lowell and Sexton encouraged Plath to write from her experience and she did so. She openly discussed her depression with Lowell and her suicide attempts with Sexton, who led her to write from a more female perspective. Plath began to consider herself as a more serious, focused poet and short story writer.[5] At this time Plath and Hughes first met the poet W.S. Merwin, who admired their work and was to remain a lifelong friend.[26] Plath resumed psychoanalytic treatment in December, working with Ruth Beuscher.[5]

Chalcot Square, near Primrose Hill in London, Plath and Hughes' home from 1959

Plath and Hughes traveled across Canada and the United States, staying at the Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York in late 1959. Plath says that it was here that she learned "to be true to my own weirdnesses", but she remained anxious about writing confessionally, from deeply personal and private material.[5][27] The couple moved back to England in December 1959 and lived in London at 3 Chalcot Square, near the Primrose Hill area of Regent's Park, where an English Heritage plaque records Plath's residence.[28][29] Their daughter Frieda was born on April 1, 1960, and in October, Plath published The Colossus, her first collection of poetry.[28]

In February 1961, Plath's second pregnancy ended in miscarriage; several of her poems, including "Parliament Hill Fields", address this event.[30] In a letter to her therapist, Plath wrote that Hughes beat her two days before the miscarriage.[31] In August she finished her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar and immediately after this, the family moved to Court Green in the small market town of North Tawton. Nicholas was born in January 1962.[28] In mid-1962, Plath and Hughes began to keep bees, which would be the subject of many Plath poems.[5]

In August 1961, the couple rented their flat at Chalcot Square to Assia (née Gutmann) Wevill and David Wevill.[32] Hughes was immediately struck with the beautiful Assia, as she was with him. In June 1962, Plath had a car accident which she described as one of many suicide attempts. In July 1962, Plath discovered Hughes had been having an affair with Assia Wevill; in September, Plath and Hughes separated.[28]

Beginning in October 1962, Plath experienced a great burst of creativity and wrote most of the poems on which her reputation now rests, writing at least 26 of the poems of her posthumous collection Ariel during the final months of her life.[28][33][34] In December 1962, she returned alone to London with their children, and rented, on a five-year lease, a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road—only a few streets from the Chalcot Square flat. 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 northern winter of 1962–1963 was one of the coldest in 100 years; the pipes froze, the children—now two years old and nine months—were often sick, and the house had no telephone.[35] Her depression returned but she completed the rest of her poetry collection, which would be published after her death (1965 in the UK, 1966 in the US). Her only novel, The Bell Jar, was published in January 1963, under the pen name Victoria Lucas, and was met with critical indifference.[36]

Before her death, Plath tried several times to take her own life.[37] On August 24, 1953, she overdosed on sleeping pills,[38] then, in June 1962, she drove her car off the side of the road into a river, which she later said was an attempt to take her own life.[39]

In January 1963, Plath spoke with John Horder, her general practitioner, and a close friend who lived near her. 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.[37] She lost 20 pounds (9 kg).[37] However, she continued to take care of her physical appearance and did not outwardly speak of feeling guilty or unworthy.[37]

23 Fitzroy Road, near Primrose Hill, London, where Plath died by suicide

Horder prescribed her an anti-depressant, a monoamine oxidase inhibitor,[37] a few days before her suicide. Knowing she was at risk with two young children, he says he visited her daily and made strenuous efforts to have her admitted to a hospital; when that failed, he arranged for a live-in nurse.

Hughes claimed in a hand-written note to the literary critic Keith Sagar, discovered in 2001, that the anti-depressants prescribed were a "key factor" in Plath’s suicide. He said Plath had previously had an adverse reaction to some prescribed pills she had taken when they lived in the USA. When they moved back to England the pills were sold under a different name, and although Hughes does not name the pills explicitly, he claimed they were prescribed by a new doctor who had no idea of the negative side-effects for Plath.[40]

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, however, side effects of anti-depressants can begin immediately.[41]

The nurse was due to arrive at nine on the morning of February 11, 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 with her head in the oven, having sealed the rooms between her and her sleeping children with tape, towels and cloths.[42] She was 30 years old.[43]

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 gas at a time when Thomas would have been able to see the note (although the escaping gas had seeped downstairs and also rendered Thomas unconscious while he slept).[44] 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."[45] 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."[43] Plath had described the quality of her despair as "owl's talons clenching my heart".[46]

In his 1972 book on suicide, The Savage God, friend and critic Al Alvarez claimed that Plath's suicide was an unanswered cry for help,[43] and spoke, in a BBC interview in March 2000, about his failure to recognize Plath's depression, saying he regretted his inability to offer her emotional support: "I failed her on that level. I was thirty years old and stupid. What did I know about chronic clinical depression? She kind of needed someone to take care of her. And that was not something I could do."[47]

Plath's grave at Heptonstall church, West Yorkshire

An inquest was held on February 15 and gave a ruling of suicide as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning.[48] 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 from Smith College, he wrote "That's the end of my life. The rest is posthumous."[35][49] Wevill also committed suicide, using a gas stove, six years later.

Plath's gravestone, in Heptonstall's parish churchyard of St Thomas the Apostle bears the inscription that Hughes chose for her:[50] "Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted." Biographers attribute the source of the quote to the Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita[50] or to the 16th-century Buddhist novel Journey to the West written by Wu Cheng'en.[51][52]

Plath's daughter Frieda Hughes is a writer and artist. On March 16, 2009, Plath's son Nicholas Hughes hanged himself at his home in Fairbanks, Alaska, following a history of depression.[53][54]

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.[56] It was, 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."[10]

The Colossus received largely positive UK reviews, highlighting Plath's voice as new and strong, individual and American in tone. Peter Dickinson at Punch called the collection "a real find" and "exhilarating to read", full of "clean, easy verse".[56] Bernard Bergonzi at the Manchester Guardian wrote the book was an "outstanding technical accomplishment" with a "virtuoso quality".[56] From the point of publication, she became a presence on the poetry scene. The book was published in America in 1962 to less-glowing reviews. While her craft was generally praised, her writing was viewed by some critics at the time as more derivative of other poets.[56]

Plath's semi-autobiographical novel—her mother wanted to block publication—was published in 1963 and in the US in 1971.[36][57] Describing the compilation of the book to her mother, she wrote, "What I've done is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalising to add color—it's a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he 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".[58] She described her novel as "an autobiographical apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the past".[59] 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.[60] Plath also used the novel to highlight the issue of women in the workforce during the 1950s. She strongly believed in women's abilities to be writers and editors while society forced them to fulfill secretarial roles:[61]

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)

In 1963, after The Bell Jar was published, Plath began working on another literary work, titled Double Exposure, which was never published.[62] According to Ted Hughes in 1979, Plath left behind a typescript of "some 130 pages",[63] but in 1995 he spoke of just "sixty, seventy pages".[64] Olwyn Hughes wrote in 2003 that the typescript may have consisted of the first two chapters, and did not exceed sixty pages.[65]

The posthumous publication of Ariel in 1965 precipitated Plath's rise to fame.[5] The poems in Ariel mark a departure from her earlier work into a more personal arena of poetry. Robert Lowell's poetry may have played a part in this shift as she cited Lowell's 1959 book Life Studies as a significant influence, in an interview just before her death.[67] 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".[67] Plath's work is often held within the genre of confessional poetry and the style of her work compared to other contemporaries, such as Lowell and W.D. Snodgrass. Plath's close friend Al Alvarez, who wrote about her extensively, said of her later work: "Plath's case is complicated by the fact that, in her mature work, she deliberately used the details of her everyday life as raw material for her art. A casual visitor or unexpected telephone call, a cut, a bruise, a kitchen bowl, a candlestick—everything became usable, charged with meaning, transformed. Her poems are full of references and images that seem impenetrable at this distance, but which could mostly be explained in footnotes by a scholar with full access to the details of her life."[68] Many of Plath's later poems deal with what one critic calls the "domestic surreal" in which Plath takes everyday elements of life and twists the images, giving them an almost nightmarish quality. Plath's poem "Morning Song" from Ariel is regarded as one of her finest poems on freedom of expression of an artist.[69]

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."[70] 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.[71] Revisionist critics such as Tracy Brain have, however, argued against a tightly autobiographical interpretation of Plath's material.[72] On January 16, 2004, The Independent newspaper in London published an article that ranked Ariel as the 3rd best book of modern poetry among 'The 10 Best Modern Poetry Books.'

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.[36] Writing in New Statesman, fellow poet Peter Porter wrote:

Crossing the Water is full of perfectly realised works. Its most striking impression is of a front-rank artist in the process of discovering her true power. Such is Plath's control that the book possesses a singularity and certainty which should make it as celebrated as The Colossus or Ariel.[73]

The Collected Poems, published in 1981, edited and introduced by Ted Hughes, contained poetry written from 1956 until her death. Plath posthumously was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.[36] In 2006, Anna Journey, then a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University, discovered a previously unpublished sonnet written by Plath titled "Ennui". The poem, composed during Plath's early years at Smith College, was published in the online journal Blackbird.[74][lower-alpha 2]

Plath's letters 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.[36] Plath began keeping a diary from the age of 11 and continued doing so until her suicide. 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.[75]

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.[76] More than half of the new volume contained newly released material;[75] 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)."[5][77]

Plath's voice is heard in a BBC documentary about her life, recorded in London in late 1962.[105] Of the BBC recording Elizabeth Hardwick wrote:

I have never before learned anything from a poetic reading, unless the clothes, the beard, the girls, the poor or good condition of the poet can be considered a kind of knowledge. But I was taken aback by Sylvia Plath's reading. It was not anything like I could have imagined. Not a trace of the modest, retreating, humorous Worcester, Massachusetts, of Elizabeth Bishop; nothing of the swallowed plain Pennsylvania of Marianne Moore. Instead these bitter poems—"Daddy", "Lady Lazarus", "The Applicant", "Fever 103°"—were beautifully read, projected in full-throated, plump, diction-perfect, Englishy, mesmerizing cadences, all round and rapid, and paced and spaced. Poor recessive Massachusetts had been erased. "I have done it again!" Clearly, perfectly, staring you down. She seemed to be standing at a banquet like Timon, crying, "Uncover, dogs, and lap!"[106]

Gwyneth Paltrow portrayed Plath in the biopic Sylvia (2003). Despite criticism from Elizabeth Sigmund, a friend of Plath and Hughes, that Plath was portrayed as a "permanent depressive and possessive person", she conceded that "the film has an atmosphere towards the end of her life which is heartbreaking in its accuracy".[107] Frieda Hughes, now a poet and painter, who was age 2 when her mother died, was angered by the making of entertainment featuring her parents' lives. She accused the "peanut crunching" public of wanting to be titillated by the family's tragedies.[108] In 2003, Frieda reacted to the situation in the poem "My Mother" in Tatler:[109]

Now they want to make a film
For anyone lacking the ability
To imagine the body, head in oven,
Orphaning children

 ... they think
I should give them my mother's words
To fill the mouth of their monster,
Their Sylvia Suicide Doll

• The Colossus and Other Poems (1960, William Heinemann)
• Ariel (1965, Faber and Faber)
• Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices (1968, Turret Books)[110]
• Crossing the Water (1971, Faber and Faber)
• Winter Trees (1971, Faber and Faber)
• The Collected Poems (1981, Faber and Faber)
• Selected Poems (1985, Faber and Faber)
• Ariel: The Restored Edition (2004, Faber and Faber)

• The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" (novel, 1963, Heinemann)
• Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 (1975, Harper & Row, US; Faber and Faber, UK)
• Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts (1977, Faber and Faber)
• The Journals of Sylvia Plath (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)[76]

  I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.

• The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil (2017, Faber and Faber)
• The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil (2018, Faber and Faber)
• Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom (2019, Faber and Faber)[111][112]

• The Bed Book, illustrated by Quentin Blake (1976, Faber and Faber)
• The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit (1996, Faber and Faber)
• Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen (2001, Faber and Faber)
• Collected Children's Stories (UK, 2001, Faber and Faber)