Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of a German-born entomologist and a woman of Austrian descent who taught school. Her father, Otto Plath, died of complications from undiagnosed diabetes when Sylvia was eight, an event she experienced as abandonment and that haunted her imagination for the rest of her life. She was a precocious student, publishing her first poem at age eight and her first story in Seventeen magazine at seventeen. She attended Smith College on scholarship, was a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine in New York in the summer of 1953, and suffered the severe mental breakdown and suicide attempt that she would later fictionalize in her novel. She recovered at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, and returned to complete her degree summa cum laude.
Plath won a Fulbright Scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she met the English poet Ted Hughes at a literary party in 1956. Their marriage was a passionate and turbulent union of two extraordinarily gifted poets; they had two children, Frieda and Nicholas. Plath published her first poetry collection, The Colossus, in 1960, a technically accomplished but relatively restrained volume that gave little warning of the volcanic breakthrough to come. After Hughes’s infidelity and their separation in 1962, Plath entered the most productive and ferocious period of her creative life, writing the poems that would be collected in Ariel (1965) at a rate of sometimes two or three a day, working in the early morning hours before her children woke.
The Bell Jar, published in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas and republished under her own name posthumously in 1966, is Plath’s only novel and one of the most powerful accounts of mental illness in twentieth-century literature. Drawing directly on her 1953 breakdown and hospitalization, it follows Esther Greenwood, a talented young woman who wins a prestigious internship in New York and returns home to find herself spiraling into depression and suicidal crisis. The novel captures with forensic precision the claustrophobia of 1950s gender expectations, the inadequacy of mid-century psychiatric treatment, and the specific texture of severe depression — the suffocating “bell jar” that isolates the sufferer from the world. It is both a period document and a timeless psychological portrait.
Plath’s poetry is among the most technically accomplished and emotionally raw in the English language. The Ariel poems — “Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,” “Fever 103°,” “Cut,” “Death & Co.” — deploy a confessional intensity, a savage wit, and an astonishing richness of imagery to explore female experience, the legacy of the father, the body, and the pull of death. The Confessional school of poetry, of which she and Robert Lowell were the central figures, changed the possibilities of lyric poetry in English by making the self, in all its pathological extremity, legitimate poetic subject matter.
Sylvia Plath died by suicide on February 11, 1963, in London, aged thirty. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry posthumously in 1982 for The Collected Poems. Her legacy has been complicated by debates over Ted Hughes’s editorial control of her posthumous work and by the intensity of her biographical legend, but her achievement as a writer stands independent of these controversies. The Bell Jar and the Ariel poems continue to be read worldwide as essential documents of female experience and human psychological suffering.
