Sylvia Plath

Writers Datebook: October 27

 

Famous American Writer of Modern Women's Movement, Poet & Novelist

Brief biography of famous American Poet and Novelist Sylvia Plath – her life and works - still shrouded with controversy due to her suicide at young age of 30.

Sylvia Plath, born in Boston, Massachussetts on October 27, 1932, was a renowned American poet whose brilliant career was cut short by her tragic suicide, February 11, 1963, aged 30. Nearly 20 years after her death, in 1982, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her Collected Poems.

Plath's father, a German immigrant and biology professor, died when she was eight. She was close to her father as evident in her poetry. Her mother was a secondary school teacher. From an early age, Plath had a drive to achieve. After the trauma of her father's death, she published her first poem. By the time she was 18, she had published poetry and stories, and won a scholarship to Smith College.

While still at Smith College, she had bout with depression, and had a mental breakdown which became the subject of her autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. Despite her illness, she returned to Smith and graduated with honours, then went to Cambridge University on a Fulbright Fellowship. At Cambridge, she met and married the English poet, Ted Hughes. Plath retained her maiden name.

The couple lived briefly in the US after graduating from Cambridge, and taught at Smith. At age 28, she gave birth to a daughter and also published her poetry collection, The Colossus. The same year, they returned to England and she had a son two years later.

Her dreams of balancing family and her love for words fell apart when she found out her husband's affair with a married woman in 1962. She filed for divorce. Feeling isolated, and struggling with the difficulties of trying to write and raise two small children, she killed herself the following year.

Plath's poems focus on the themes of women's creativity and insanity. The pressures on her to conform as a middle-class woman, good wife and mother, and poet contributed to her breakdown and eventual suicide. Ariel, published after her death, was a collection of her best poems through which she became well known. It was also controversial, linking women's oppression that coincided with the feminist movement at that time.

 

Books by Sylvia Plath

The Colossus, Poetry Collection, 1960 

The Three Women, 1962

The Bell Jar, autobiographical novel, 1963

 

Books Published After She Died

The Colossus, Poetry, 1960

The Bell Jar, 1963, an autobiographical novel, pseudonym Victoria Lucas

Ariel, Poetry Collection, 1965

Crossing the Water, Poetry 1971

Winter Trees, 1971

Collected Poems, 1981, edited by ex-husband Ted Hughes

The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1983

Selected Poems, 1985

 

Suggested Readings:

Letters Home by Sylvia Plath, Faber and Faber. 1975

Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes, Faber and Faber. 1998

Sylvia and Ted, a Novel by Emma Tennant, Flamingo. 2001 

 

Image Credit:

Sylvia Plath. Public Domain.

    

Resources:

Goring, Rosemary, Ed.  Larousse Dictionary of Writers. 1994.

Weatherford, Doris. American Women's History. Prentice Hall. 1994. 

 

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