Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, to Otto and Aurelia Schoeber Plath, both professors. When Sylvia was eight, Otto died of complications from diabetes. Her mother struggled to give Sylvia and her younger brother every advantage of a superior education. Self-consciousness and anxiety about status and money contributed to profound insecurity Plath concealed all her life beneath a facade of energy and brilliant achievement. Sylvia published her first poem at age eight. By the time she entered Smith College on scholarship in 1950, she had published many poems and short stories in newspapers and ladies' magazines. She was selected as a guest editor of Mademoiselle Magazine in 1953. Amid feverish overwork at Smith, she broke down in her junior year and attempted suicide. She spent almost a year in a mental hospital and was given electroconvulsive shock treatments. Sylvia eventually returned to Smith, graduating summa cum laude and winning a Fulbright fellowship to study at Cambridge University in England. In February 1956, she met poet Ted Hughes, and married him four months later. After Sylvia received her MA from Cambridge, the couple lived in Massachusetts (teaching at Smith and Amherst Colleges), then returned to England. The marriage was for six years a strong union of supremely dedicated writers. Ted's poem collections were critically praised, as was Sylvia's first volume of poetry, The Colossus, published in 1960. Sylvia worked on her autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, which narrated a college student's nervous breakdown and recovery. Despite thriving careers and the birth of two children, personal jealousies and a return of Sylvia's depression troubled the marriage. Sylvia soon faced Hughes's infidelity, expressing herself through increasingly angry and powerful poems. After the couple separated in fall 1962, Sylvia's deep depression was fueled by the worst winter in a century, poverty, and the struggle to care for two infants. She committed suicide in February 1963, just two weeks after The Bell Jar's publication. In the 40 years following her death, Sylvia Plath has become a heroine and martyr of the feminist movement, with her work foreshadowing the feminist writing that appeared in the 1960s and 1970s. Sylvia's poems remain a terrifying record of her encroaching mental illness--graphically macabre and hallucinatory, but full of ironic wit, technical brilliance, and tremendous emotional power. Her Selected Poems, published by Ted Hughes in 1981, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.