Sylvia Plath
Encyclopedia
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Born in Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College
and Newnham College, Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes
in 1956 and they lived together first in the United States and then England, having two children together: Frieda
and Nicholas
. Following a long struggle with depression and a marital separation, Plath committed suicide in 1963.Becker
. (2003) Controversy continues to surround the events of her life and death, as well as her writing and legacy.
Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two collections published: The Colossus and Other Poems
and Ariel. In 1982, she became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize
posthumously, for The Collected Poems. She also wrote The Bell Jar
, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death.
on October 27, 1932 at the Massachusetts Memorial Hospital in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood.Sally Brown and Clare L. Taylor, "Plath, Sylvia (1932–1963)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 Her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath
, was a first-generation American of Austrian descent, and her father Otto Emile Plath was from Grabow
, Germany. Plath's father was a professor of biology and German at Boston University
, author of a book about bumblebees. Plath's mother was approximately twenty-one years younger than her husband. They met while she was earning her master's degree in teaching and took one of his courses. Otto had become alienated from his family in his choosing not to become a Lutheran minister, as his grandparents had intended him to be.
In April 1935, Plath's brother Warren was born and in 1936 the family moved to Winthrop, Massachusetts
. Plath's mother, Aurelia, had grown up in Winthrop, and her maternal grandparents, the Schobers, had lived in a section of the town 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. 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.
Otto Plath died on November 5, 1940, a week and a half after Plath's eighth birthday, 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
Christian, Plath experienced a loss of faith after her father's death, and remained ambivalent about religion throughout her life. He was buried in Winthrop Cemetery; visiting her father's grave prompted Plath to write the poem Electra on Azalea Path. After his death, Aurelia Plath moved her children and her parents to 26 Elmwood Road, Wellesley, Massachusetts
in 1942. In one of her last prose pieces, Plath commented that her first nine years "sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth". Plath attended Bradford Senior High School in Wellesley, graduating in 1950.
In 1950, Plath attended Smith College
and excelled academically. She wrote to her mother, "The world is splitting open at my feet like a ripe, juicy watermelon."Sally Brown Clare L. Taylor, "Plath , Sylvia (1932–1963)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; Oct 2009 She edited The Smith Review and during the summer after her third year of college Plath was awarded a coveted position as guest editor at Mademoiselle
magazine, during which she spent a month in New York City. The experience was not what she had hoped it would be, and it began a downward spiral. Many of the events that took place during that summer were later used as inspiration for her novel The Bell Jar. During this time she was refused admission to the Harvard writing seminar. Following electroconvulsive therapy
for depression, Plath made her first medically documented suicide attempt in late August 1953 by crawling under her house and taking an overdose of her mother's sleeping pills. She survived this first suicide attempt after lying unfound in a crawl space for three days, 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 Dr. Ruth Beuscher. Her stay at McLean Hospital
and her Smith scholarship were paid for by Olive Higgins Prouty
, who had successfully recovered from a mental breakdown herself. 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 Dostoevsky's Novels and in June, graduated from Smith with highest honors.
She obtained a Fulbright scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge
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. She spent her first year winter and spring holidays travelling around the continent.
), Plath describes how she met Ted Hughes:
The couple were married on June 16, 1956 at St George the Martyr Holborn
in the London Borough of Camden
with Plath's mother in attendance, and honeymooned in Benidorm
. Plath returned to Newnham in October to begin her second year. During this time, they both became deeply interested in astrology and the supernatural, using Ouija
boards. In early 1957, Plath and Hughes moved to the United States and from September 1957 Plath taught at Smith College, her alma mater. She found it difficult to both teach and have enough time and energy to write Kirk (2004) pxix and 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 took creative writing seminars given by poet Robert Lowell
(also attended by the writers Anne Sexton
and George Starbuck
). 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 conceive of herself as a more serious, focused poet and short-story writer. At this time Plath and Hughes first met the poet W. S. Merwin
, who admired their work and was to remain a lifelong friend. Plath resumed psychoanalytic treatment in December, working with Ruth Beuscher.
Plath and Hughes traveled across Canada and the US, staying at the Yaddo
artist colony in New York State in the Autumn of 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. The couple moved back to the United Kingdom in December 1959 andKirk (2004) pxx lived in London at 3 Chalcot Square, near the Primrose Hill
area of Regent's Park
. Their daughter Frieda
was born on 1 April 1960 and in October, Plath published her first collection of poetry, The Colossus. In February 1961, Plath's second pregnancy ended in miscarriage; a number of her poems, including "Parliament Hill Fields", address this event. 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
in Devon
. Nicholas
was born in January 1962.During the summer of 1962, Hughes began to keep bees, which would be the subject of many Plath poems.
In 1961, the couple rented their flat in Chalcot Square to Assia and David Wevill. Hughes was immediately struck with the beautiful Assia, as she was with him. He would later write in "Dreamers" (Birthday Letters, 1998)
"The dreamer in her
Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it.
That moment the dreamer in me
Fell in love with her and I knew it,"
In June Plath had 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 Wevill and in September the couple separated.
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 this time. In December 1962, she returned alone to London with their children, and rented a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road on a five year lease, (only a few streets from the Chalcot Square flat) in a house where William Butler Yeats
once lived. Plath was pleased by this fact and considered it a good omen. The winter of 1962 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.Gifford, Terry (2008). Ted Hughes. Routledge. p15 ISBN 0415311896 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
came out in January 1963, published under the pen name Victoria Lucas, and was met with critical indifference.
The nurseVarious biographies describe the woman who discovered the body as a nurse or an au pair. No name is given. Gifford (2008); Kirk (2004). was due to arrive at nine o'clock the morning of 11 February 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 of carbon monoxide poisoning
in the kitchen, with her head in the oven, having sealed the rooms between herself and her sleeping children with wet towels and cloths. At approximately 4:30 am, Plath had placed her head in the oven, with the gas turned on. She was 30.
It has been suggested that Plath had not intended to succeed in killing herself. That morning, she asked her downstairs neighbor, a Mr. Thomas, what time he would be leaving. A note had also been left reading "Call Dr. Horder," listing his phone number. Therefore, it is argued Plath turned the gas on at a time when Mr. Thomas should have been waking and beginning his day. This theory maintains that the gas seeped through the floor for several hours and reached Mr. Thomas and another resident of the floor below. However, in her biography Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath, Plath's best 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.'" Dr. 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." In his 1971 book on suicide, friend and critic Al Alvarez
claimed that Plath's suicide was an unanswered cry for help.
An enquiry on the day following Plath's death gave a ruling of suicide. Hughes was devastated; they had been separated five months. 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." Plath's gravestone in Heptonstall
churchyard bears the inscription that Hughes chose for her: "Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted." Biographers variously attribute the source of the quote to the 16th century Buddhist novel Journey to the West
written by Wu Ch'eng-En or to the Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita
.
The 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." When Hughes' partner Assia Wevill
killed herself and their four-year-old daughter Shura in 1969, this practice intensified. After each defacement, Hughes had the damaged stone removed, sometimes leaving the site unmarked during repair. Outraged mourners accused Hughes in the media of dishonoring her name by removing the stone.Badia, Janet and Jennifer Phegle. (2005). Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present. University of Toronto Press. p252 ISBN 0802089283. Wevill's death led to claims that Hughes had been abusive to both Plath and Wevill. In 1970, radical feminist poet Robin Morgan
published the poem "Arraignment", in which she openly accused Hughes of the battery and murder of Plath; other feminists threatened to kill him in Plath's name."Rhyme, reason and depression". (February 16, 1993). The Guardian. Accessed 2010-07-09.
In 1989, with Hughes under public attack, a battle raged in the letters pages of The Guardian
and The Independent
. In The Guardian on April 20, 1989 Hughes wrote the article "The Place Where Sylvia Plath Should Rest in Peace": "In the years soon after [Plath's] death, when scholars approached me, I tried to take their apparently serious concern for the truth about Sylvia Plath seriously. But I learned my lesson early. [...] If I tried too hard to tell them exactly how something happened, in the hope of correcting some fantasy, I was quite likely to be accused of trying to suppress Free Speech. In general, my refusal to have anything to do with the Plath Fantasia has been regarded as an attempt to suppress Free Speech [...] The Fantasia about Sylvia Plath is more needed than the facts. Where that leaves respect for the truth of her life (and of mine), or for her memory, or for the literary tradition, I do not know."
On March 16, 2009, Nicholas Hughes
, the son of Plath and Hughes, hanged himself at his home in Alaska, following a history of depression.
and on her graduation in 1955, she won the Glascock Prize
for Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea
. Later at Newnham, Cambridge, she wrote for the Varsity
magazine. By the time Heinmann
published her first collection, The Colossus and other poems in the UK in late in 1960, Plath had been short-listed several times in the Yale Younger Poets
book competition and had had work printed in Harper's
, The Spectator
and the Times Literary Supplement. All the poems in The Colossus had already been printed in major US and British journals and she had a contract with The New Yorker
. It was however her 1965 collection Ariel, published posthumously, on which Plath's reputation essentially rests.
In 1971, the volumes Winter Trees and Crossing the Water were published in the UK, including previously unseen nine poems from the original manuscript of Ariel. The Collected Poems, published in 1981, edited and introduced by Ted Hughes, contained poetry written from 1956 until her death. Plath was awarded the Pulitzer Prize
for poetry, the first poet to win the prize posthumously. In 2006 Anna Journey
, then a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University
, discovered a previously unpublished sonnet
written by Plath entitled Ennui
. The poem, composed during Plath's early years at Smith College, is published in Blackbird, the online journal.Two poems entitled Ennui (I) and Ennui (II) are listed in a partial catalogue of Plath's juvenilia in the Collected Poems. A note explains that the texts of all but half a dozen of the many pieces listed are in the Sylvia Plath Archive of juvenilia in the Lilly Library
at Indiana University. The rest are with the Sylvia Plath Estate.
at Punch
called the collection "a real find" and "exhilarating to read", full of "clean, easy verse". Bernard Bergonzi
at the Manchester Guardian said the book was an "outstanding technical accomplishment" with a "virtuoso' quality". From the point of publication she became a presence on the poetry scene. The book went on to be published in America in 1962 to less glowing reviews. Whilst her craft was generally praised, her writing was viewed as more derivative of other poets. Some later critics have described the first book as somewhat young, staid or conventional in comparison to the more free-flowing imagery and intensity of her later work.
It was Hughes' publication of Ariel in 1965 that precipitated Plath's rise to fame. 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.Time
and Life
both reviewed the slim volume of Ariel in the wake of her death.The critic at Time said: "Within a week of her death, intellectual London was hunched over copies of a strange and terrible poem she had written during her last sick slide toward suicide. 'Daddy' was its title; its subject was her morbid love-hatred of her father; its style was as brutal as a truncheon. What is more, 'Daddy' was merely the first jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bile across the literary landscape. [...] Death like a Poem. In her most ferocious poems, 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus,' fear, hate, love, death and the poet's own identity become fused at black heat with the figure of her father, and through him, with the guilt of the German exterminators and the suffering of their Jewish victims. They are poems, as Robert Lowell says in his preface to Ariel, that 'play Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder.'"Plath has been criticized for her numerous and controversial allusions to the Holocaust
. See Boot in the Face: The Problem of the Holocaust in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath
Some in the feminist movement saw Plath as speaking for their experience, as a "symbol of blighted female genius". Writer Honor Moore
describes Ariel as marking the beginning of a movement, Plath suddenly visible as "a woman on paper", certain and audacious. Moore says: "When Sylvia Plath’s Ariel was published in the United States in 1966, American women noticed. Not only women who ordinarily read poems, but housewives and mothers whose ambitions had awakened [...] Here was a woman, superbly trained in her craft, whose final poems uncompromisingly charted female rage, ambivalence, and grief, in a voice with which many women identified."
The United States Postal Service will introduce a postage stamp featuring Sylvia Plath in 2012.
, W. B. Yeats and Marianne Moore
. Late in 1959, when she and Hughes were at the Yaddo writers' colony in New York State, she wrote the seven-part "Poem for a Birthday", echoing Theodore Roethke
's Lost Son sequence, though its theme is her own traumatic breakdown and suicide attempt at 21. 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 shot through with themes of death, redemption and resurrection. After Hughes left, Plath produced, in less than two months, the forty poems of rage, despair, love, and vengeance on which her reputation mostly rests.
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.Wagner-Martin (1988) p184 Posthumously published in 1966, 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 work is often held within the genre of confessional poetry and the style of her work compared to other contemporaries, such as Robert Lowell
and W.D. Snodgrass. Plath's close friend Al Alvarez
, who has written 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." Many of Plath's later poems deal with what one critic calls the "domestic surreal" in which Plath takes every day elements of life and twists the images, giving them an almost nightmarish quality.
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-dramatization" and of self-pity
. Revisionist critics such as Tracy Brain have, however, argued against a tightly autobiographical interpretation of Plath's material.
. 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.Kirk (2004) pxxi Plath had kept a diary from the age of 11 until her death, doing so until her suicide. Her adult diaries, starting from her first year at Smith College in 1950, were first 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 fiftieth anniversary of Plath's death.Kirk (2004) pxxii
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. Kukil finished her editing in December 1999, and in 2000 Anchor Books published The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. More than half of the new volume contained was 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)."
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 near Saranac Lake
. While visiting Norton, Plath broke her leg skiing, an incident that was fictionalized in the novel.
As Hughes and Plath were legally married at the time of her death, Hughes inherited the Plath estate, including all her written work. Hughes has been condemned from some quarters for burning Plath's last journal, saying he "did not want her children to have to read it."Christodoulides, Nephie (2005) Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking: Motherhood in Sylvia Plath's Work. Rodopi Ltd. pix ISBN 9042017724 He lost another journal and an unfinished novel and instructed that a collection of Plath's papers and journals should not be released until 2013. In the reams of literary criticism and biography published after their deaths, after the release of new material, biopics, or any old-new controversy, the debate over Plath's literary estate is very often reduced to black and white, that is, whose story the readers choose. Hughes 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.
Still the subject of speculation and approbation, Hughes published Birthday Letters
in 1998, his own collection of 88 poems about his relationship with Plath. Hughes had published very little about his experience of the marriage and subsequent suicide and the book caused a sensation, being taken as his first explicit disclosure, topping best seller charts. It was not known at the volume's release that Hughes was suffering from terminal cancer and would die later that year. It went on to win the Forward Poetry Prize
, the T. S. Eliot Prize
for Poetry and the Whitbread Poetry. The poems, written after her death, in some cases long after, are an account of a failure, circling round a missing centre, trying to find a reason for why she took her own life.
Plath was portrayed by Gwyneth Paltrow
in the 2003 film Sylvia
. Frieda Hughes
, now a poet and painter, who was two years old 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. In 2003, she published her poem "My Mother" in Tatler
:
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
From My Mother, in The Book of Mirrors (2003) by Frieda Hughes
(1960) Ariel
(1961–1965) Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices (1968)
Crossing the Water (1971)
Winter Trees (1971)
The Collected Poems (1981)
Selected Poems (1985)
Plath: Poems (1998)
Sylvia Plath Reads, Harper Audio (2000) (Audio)
: A novel (1963), under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 (1975)
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts
(1977) The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)
The Magic Mirror (published 1989), Plath's Smith College senior thesis
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil (2000)
The It-Doesn't-Matter-Suit (1996)
Collected Children's Stories (UK, 2001)
Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen (2001)
Alvarez, Al (2007) Risky Business. Bloomsbury. ISBN 9780747587446
Axelrod, Steven Gould. (1992). Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words. Johns Hopkins University. ISBN 080184374X.
Becker, Jillian
. (2003). Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath, A memoir. New York: St Martins Press. ISBN 0312315988.
Brain, Tracy. (2010) The Other Sylvia Plath. Essex: Longman, 2001
http://books.google.com/books?id=aMUkBQ-3mnUC&pg=PA11&lpg=PA11&dq=dangerous+confessions+reading+sylvia+plath&source=bl&ots=rhy83_ED2d&sig=4XuJXepIrr-nnL_gNEZwcayZvoI&hl=en&ei=pacJTO-rIMP7lwfRzrCzDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=dangerous%20confessions%20reading%20sylvia%20plath&f=falseBrain, Tracy Dangerous Confessions: The Problem of Reading Sylvia Plath Biographically."] Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays. Ed. Jo Gill.
Butscher, Edward. (2003). Sylvia Plath: Method & Madness (A Biography). ISBN 0971059829.
Hayman, Ronald
. (1991). The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath. Carol Publishing. ISBN 1559720689.
Helle, Anita (Ed). (2007). The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0472069276.
Hemphill, Stephanie. (2007). Your Own, Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath. ISBN 037583799X.
Kyle, Barry
. (1976). Sylvia Plath: A Dramatic Portrait Conceived and Adapted from Her Writings. Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0571106981.
Kirk, Connie Ann
. (2004). Sylvia Plath: A Biography. Greenwood Press. ISBN 0313332142.
Malcolm, Janet
. (1995). The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Vintage. ISBN 0679751408.
Middlebrook, Diane
. (2003). Her Husband: Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath, a Marriage. Viking Adult. ISBN 0670031879.
Steinberg, Peter K. (2004). Sylvia Plath. Chelsea House. ISBN 0791078434.
Plath Helle, Anita. (2007). The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0472069276.
Stevenson, Anne. (1989). Bitter Fame. A Life of Sylvia Plath. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0395453747.
Wagner, Erica
. (2002). Ariel's Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and the Story of Birthday Letters
. W.W. Norton. ISBN 0393323013.
Wagner-Martin, Linda. (2003). Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0333631145.
Wagner-Martin, Linda (Ed). (1988). Sylvia Plath (Critical Heritage). Routledge. ISBN 0415009103.
Smith College
Smith College is a private, independent women's liberal arts college located in Northampton, Massachusetts. It is the largest member of the Seven Sisters...
and Newnham College, Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes
Edward James Hughes OM , more commonly known as Ted Hughes, was an English poet and children's writer. Critics routinely rank him as one of the best poets of his generation. Hughes was British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death.Hughes was married to American poet Sylvia Plath, from 1956 until...
in 1956 and they lived together first in the United States and then England, having two children together: Frieda
Frieda Hughes
Frieda Rebecca Hughes is an English poet and painter. She has published seven children's books and four poetry collections and has had many exhibitions.-Early life:...
and Nicholas
Nicholas Hughes
Nicholas Farrar Hughes was a fisheries biologist known as an expert in stream salmonid ecology. Hughes was the son of the American poet Sylvia Plath and English poet Ted Hughes and the younger brother of English artist and poet Frieda Hughes...
. Following a long struggle with depression and a marital separation, Plath committed suicide in 1963.Becker
Jillian Becker
Jillian Becker is a novelist, prize-winning story-writer, critic, journalist, lecturer, best known internationally as a writer, researcher, and authority on the subject of terrorism.-Life:...
. (2003) Controversy continues to surround the events of her life and death, as well as her writing and legacy.
Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two collections published: The Colossus and Other Poems
The Colossus and Other Poems
The Colossus and Other Poems is a poetry collection by American poet Sylvia Plath, named after the poem The Colossus. It was first published in 1960.-Contents:The 44 poems presented here are in the published order #The Manor Garden...
and Ariel. In 1982, she became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
posthumously, for The Collected Poems. She also wrote The Bell Jar
The Bell Jar
The Bell Jar is American writer and poet Sylvia Plath's only novel, which was originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963. The novel is semi-autobiographical with the names of places and people changed...
, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death.
Early life
Plath was born during the Great DepressionGreat Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
on October 27, 1932 at the Massachusetts Memorial Hospital in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood.Sally Brown and Clare L. Taylor, "Plath, Sylvia (1932–1963)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 Her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath
Aurelia Plath
Aurelia Plath was the wife of Otto Emile Plath, mother of the American poet, Sylvia Plath, and a son, Warren, and the grandmother of Frieda Hughes and Nicholas Hughes...
, was a first-generation American of Austrian descent, and her father Otto Emile Plath was from Grabow
Grabow
Grabow is a town in the Ludwigslust-Parchim district, in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Germany. It is situated on the river Elde, 7 km southeast of Ludwigslust, and 34 km northwest of Wittenberge.-History:...
, Germany. Plath's father was a professor of biology and German at Boston University
Boston University
Boston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...
, author of a book about bumblebees. Plath's mother was approximately twenty-one years younger than her husband. They met while she was earning her master's degree in teaching and took one of his courses. Otto had become alienated from his family in his choosing not to become a Lutheran minister, as his grandparents had intended him to be.
In April 1935, Plath's brother Warren was born and in 1936 the family moved to Winthrop, Massachusetts
Winthrop, Massachusetts
The Town of Winthrop is a municipality in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, United States. The population of Winthrop was 17,497 at the 2010 U.S. Census. It is an oceanside suburban community in Greater Boston situated at the north entrance to Boston Harbor and is very close to Logan International...
. Plath's mother, Aurelia, had grown up in Winthrop, and her maternal grandparents, the Schobers, had lived in a section of the town 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
Boston Herald
The Boston Herald is a daily newspaper that serves Boston, Massachusetts, United States, and its surrounding area. It was started in 1846 and is one of the oldest daily newspapers in the United States...
s children's section. 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.
Otto Plath died on November 5, 1940, a week and a half after Plath's eighth birthday, of complications following the amputation of a foot due to untreated diabetes
Diabetes mellitus
Diabetes mellitus, often simply referred to as diabetes, is a group of metabolic diseases in which a person has high blood sugar, either because the body does not produce enough insulin, or because cells do not respond to the insulin that is produced...
. 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
Unitarianism
Unitarianism is a Christian theological movement, named for its understanding of God as one person, in direct contrast to Trinitarianism which defines God as three persons coexisting consubstantially as one in being....
Christian, Plath experienced a loss of faith after her father's death, and remained ambivalent about religion throughout her life. He was buried in Winthrop Cemetery; visiting her father's grave prompted Plath to write the poem Electra on Azalea Path. After his death, Aurelia Plath moved her children and her parents to 26 Elmwood Road, Wellesley, Massachusetts
Wellesley, Massachusetts
Wellesley is a town in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, United States. It is part of Greater Boston. The population was 27,982 at the time of the 2010 census.It is best known as the home of Wellesley College and Babson College...
in 1942. In one of her last prose pieces, Plath commented that her first nine years "sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth". Plath attended Bradford Senior High School in Wellesley, graduating in 1950.
College years
Smith College
Smith College is a private, independent women's liberal arts college located in Northampton, Massachusetts. It is the largest member of the Seven Sisters...
and excelled academically. She wrote to her mother, "The world is splitting open at my feet like a ripe, juicy watermelon."Sally Brown Clare L. Taylor, "Plath , Sylvia (1932–1963)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; Oct 2009 She edited The Smith Review and during the summer after her third year of college Plath was awarded a coveted position as guest editor at Mademoiselle
Mademoiselle (magazine)
Mademoiselle was an influential women's magazine first published in 1935 by Street and Smith and later acquired by Condé Nast Publications....
magazine, during which she spent a month in New York City. The experience was not what she had hoped it would be, and it began a downward spiral. Many of the events that took place during that summer were later used as inspiration for her novel The Bell Jar. During this time she was refused admission to the Harvard writing seminar. Following electroconvulsive therapy
Electroconvulsive therapy
Electroconvulsive therapy , formerly known as electroshock, is a psychiatric treatment in which seizures are electrically induced in anesthetized patients for therapeutic effect. Its mode of action is unknown...
for depression, Plath made her first medically documented suicide attempt in late August 1953 by crawling under her house and taking an overdose of her mother's sleeping pills. She survived this first suicide attempt after lying unfound in a crawl space for three days, 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
Insulin shock therapy
Insulin shock therapy or insulin coma therapy was a form of psychiatric treatment in which patients were repeatedly injected with large doses of insulin in order to produce daily comas over several weeks...
under the care of Dr. Ruth Beuscher. Her stay at McLean Hospital
McLean Hospital
McLean Hospital is a psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts.It is noted for its clinical staff expertise and ground-breaking neuroscience research...
and her Smith scholarship were paid for by Olive Higgins Prouty
Olive Higgins Prouty
Olive Higgins Prouty was an American novelist and poet, best known for her pioneering consideration of psychotherapy in Now, Voyager Olive Higgins Prouty (10 January 1882 – 24 March 1974) was an American novelist and poet, best known for her pioneering consideration of psychotherapy in Now,...
, who had successfully recovered from a mental breakdown herself. 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 Dostoevsky's Novels and in June, graduated from Smith with highest honors.
She obtained a Fulbright scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge
Newnham College, Cambridge
Newnham College is a women-only constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England.The college was founded in 1871 by Henry Sidgwick, and was the second Cambridge college to admit women after Girton College...
where she continued actively writing poetry and publishing her work in the student newspaper Varsity
Varsity (Cambridge)
Varsity is the oldest of Cambridge University's main student newspapers. It has been published continuously since 1947, and is one of only three fully independent student newspapers in the UK. It appears every Friday around Cambridge...
. At Newnham, she studied with Dorothea Krook, whom she held in high regard. She spent her first year winter and spring holidays travelling around the continent.
Career and marriage
In a 1961 BBC interview (now held by the British Library Sound ArchiveBritish Library Sound Archive
The British Library Sound Archive in London, England is one of the largest collections of recorded sound in the world, including music, spoken word and ambient recordings....
), Plath describes how she met Ted Hughes:
Plath described Hughes as "a singer, story-teller, lion and world-wanderer" with "a voice like the thunder of God".
I happened to be at Cambridge. I was sent there by the [US] government on a government grant. And 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.
The couple were married on June 16, 1956 at St George the Martyr Holborn
St George the Martyr Holborn
St George the Martyr Holborn is an Anglican church located at the south end of Queen Square, Holborn, London Borough of Camden. It is dedicated to Saint George, and is so-called to distinguish it from the later nearby church of St...
in the London Borough of Camden
London Borough of Camden
In 1801, the civil parishes that form the modern borough were already developed and had a total population of 96,795. This continued to rise swiftly throughout the 19th century, as the district became built up; reaching 270,197 in the middle of the century...
with Plath's mother in attendance, and honeymooned in Benidorm
Benidorm
Benidorm is a coastal town and municipality located in the comarca of Marina Baixa, in the province of Alicante, Valencian community, Spain, by the Western Mediterranean....
. Plath returned to Newnham in October to begin her second year. During this time, they both became deeply interested in astrology and the supernatural, using Ouija
Ouija
The Ouija board also known as a spirit/fire key board or talking board, is a flat board marked with the letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0-9, the words "yes", "no", "hello" and "goodbye", and other symbols and words are sometimes also added to help personalize the board...
boards. In early 1957, Plath and Hughes moved to the United States and from September 1957 Plath taught at Smith College, her alma mater. She found it difficult to both teach and have enough time and energy to write Kirk (2004) pxix and the middle of 1958, the couple moved to Boston. Plath took a job as a receptionist in the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital
Massachusetts General Hospital
Massachusetts General Hospital is a teaching hospital and biomedical research facility in the West End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts...
and in the evening took creative writing seminars given by poet Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948...
(also attended by the writers Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton was an American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967...
and George Starbuck
George Starbuck
George Edwin Starbuck was an American poet of the neo-formalist school.-Life:...
). 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 conceive of herself as a more serious, focused poet and short-story writer. At this time Plath and Hughes first met the poet W. S. Merwin
W. S. Merwin
William Stanley Merwin is an American poet, credited with over 30 books of poetry, translation and prose. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, Merwin's writing influence derived from...
, who admired their work and was to remain a lifelong friend. Plath resumed psychoanalytic treatment in December, working with Ruth Beuscher.
Plath and Hughes traveled across Canada and the US, staying at the Yaddo
Yaddo
Yaddo is an artists' community located on a 400 acre estate in Saratoga Springs, New York. Its mission is "to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment."...
artist colony in New York State in the Autumn of 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. The couple moved back to the United Kingdom in December 1959 andKirk (2004) pxx lived in London at 3 Chalcot Square, near the Primrose Hill
Primrose Hill
Primrose Hill is a hill of located on the north side of Regent's Park in London, England, and also the name for the surrounding district. The hill has a clear view of central London to the south-east, as well as Belsize Park and Hampstead to the north...
area of Regent's Park
Regent's Park
Regent's Park is one of the Royal Parks of London. It is in the north-western part of central London, partly in the City of Westminster and partly in the London Borough of Camden...
. Their daughter Frieda
Frieda Hughes
Frieda Rebecca Hughes is an English poet and painter. She has published seven children's books and four poetry collections and has had many exhibitions.-Early life:...
was born on 1 April 1960 and in October, Plath published her first collection of poetry, The Colossus. In February 1961, Plath's second pregnancy ended in miscarriage; a number of her poems, including "Parliament Hill Fields", address this event. In August she finished her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar
The Bell Jar
The Bell Jar is American writer and poet Sylvia Plath's only novel, which was originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963. The novel is semi-autobiographical with the names of places and people changed...
and immediately after this, the family moved to Court Green
Court Green
Court Green in North Tawton, Devon, England, was the home the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath moved to in 1961. Plath left the house in December 1962, while Hughes lived there on and off for the rest of his life.- Sylvia Plath at Court Green :...
in the small market town of North Tawton
North Tawton
North Tawton is a small town in Devon, England, situated on the river Taw.-History:The Romans crossed the River Taw at what is now Newland Mill, a little outside the present town, and established a succession of military camps there over the years...
in Devon
Devon
Devon is a large county in southwestern England. The county is sometimes referred to as Devonshire, although the term is rarely used inside the county itself as the county has never been officially "shired", it often indicates a traditional or historical context.The county shares borders with...
. Nicholas
Nicholas Hughes
Nicholas Farrar Hughes was a fisheries biologist known as an expert in stream salmonid ecology. Hughes was the son of the American poet Sylvia Plath and English poet Ted Hughes and the younger brother of English artist and poet Frieda Hughes...
was born in January 1962.During the summer of 1962, Hughes began to keep bees, which would be the subject of many Plath poems.
In 1961, the couple rented their flat in Chalcot Square to Assia and David Wevill. Hughes was immediately struck with the beautiful Assia, as she was with him. He would later write in "Dreamers" (Birthday Letters, 1998)
"The dreamer in her
Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it.
That moment the dreamer in me
Fell in love with her and I knew it,"
In June Plath had 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 Wevill and in September the couple separated.
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 this time. In December 1962, she returned alone to London with their children, and rented a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road on a five year lease, (only a few streets from the Chalcot Square flat) in a house where William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...
once lived. Plath was pleased by this fact and considered it a good omen. The winter of 1962 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.Gifford, Terry (2008). Ted Hughes. Routledge. p15 ISBN 0415311896 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
The Bell Jar
The Bell Jar is American writer and poet Sylvia Plath's only novel, which was originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963. The novel is semi-autobiographical with the names of places and people changed...
came out in January 1963, published under the pen name Victoria Lucas, and was met with critical indifference.
Death
Dr. Horder, a close friend who lived near Plath, prescribed Plath antidepressants a few days before her death. Knowing she was at risk alone with two young children, he says he visited her daily and made strenuous efforts to have her admitted to a hospital and when that failed, he arranged for a live-in nurse. Some commentators have argued that because anti-depressants may take up to three weeks to take effect, her prescription from Horder would not necessarily have helped. Others say that Plath's American doctor had warned her never again to take the anti-depressant drug which she found worsened her depression but Dr. Horder had prescribed it under a proprietary name which she did not recognize.The nurseVarious biographies describe the woman who discovered the body as a nurse or an au pair. No name is given. Gifford (2008); Kirk (2004). was due to arrive at nine o'clock the morning of 11 February 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 of carbon monoxide poisoning
Carbon monoxide poisoning
Carbon monoxide poisoning occurs after enough inhalation of carbon monoxide . Carbon monoxide is a toxic gas, but, being colorless, odorless, tasteless, and initially non-irritating, it is very difficult for people to detect...
in the kitchen, with her head in the oven, having sealed the rooms between herself and her sleeping children with wet towels and cloths. At approximately 4:30 am, Plath had placed her head in the oven, with the gas turned on. She was 30.
It has been suggested that Plath had not intended to succeed in killing herself. That morning, she asked her downstairs neighbor, a Mr. Thomas, what time he would be leaving. A note had also been left reading "Call Dr. Horder," listing his phone number. Therefore, it is argued Plath turned the gas on at a time when Mr. Thomas should have been waking and beginning his day. This theory maintains that the gas seeped through the floor for several hours and reached Mr. Thomas and another resident of the floor below. However, in her biography Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath, Plath's best friend, Jillian Becker
Jillian Becker
Jillian Becker is a novelist, prize-winning story-writer, critic, journalist, lecturer, best known internationally as a writer, researcher, and authority on the subject of terrorism.-Life:...
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.'" Dr. 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." In his 1971 book on suicide, friend and critic Al Alvarez
Al Alvarez
Al Alvarez is an English poet, writer and critic who publishes under the name A. Alvarez and Al Alvarez....
claimed that Plath's suicide was an unanswered cry for help.
Following death
Heptonstall
Heptonstall is a small village and civil parish within the Calderdale borough of West Yorkshire, England. The population of Heptonstall, including the hamlets of Colden and Slack, is 1,448. The town of Hebden Bridge lies directly to the southeast...
churchyard bears the inscription that Hughes chose for her: "Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted." Biographers variously attribute the source of the quote to the 16th century Buddhist novel Journey to the West
Journey to the West
Journey to the West is one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. It was written by Wu Cheng'en in the 16th century. In English-speaking countries, the tale is also often known simply as Monkey. This was one title used for a popular, abridged translation by Arthur Waley...
written by Wu Ch'eng-En or to the Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita
Bhagavad Gita
The ' , also more simply known as Gita, is a 700-verse Hindu scripture that is part of the ancient Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, but is frequently treated as a freestanding text, and in particular, as an Upanishad in its own right, one of the several books that constitute general Vedic tradition...
.
The 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." When Hughes' partner Assia Wevill
Assia Wevill
Assia Wevill was a German-born woman who escaped the Nazis, lived in British Palestine and later in Britain, and is best known for her relationship with the English poet Ted Hughes. She killed herself and also her four-year-old daughter Alexandra Tatiana Elise . Six years earlier, Hughes's wife...
killed herself and their four-year-old daughter Shura in 1969, this practice intensified. After each defacement, Hughes had the damaged stone removed, sometimes leaving the site unmarked during repair. Outraged mourners accused Hughes in the media of dishonoring her name by removing the stone.Badia, Janet and Jennifer Phegle. (2005). Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present. University of Toronto Press. p252 ISBN 0802089283. Wevill's death led to claims that Hughes had been abusive to both Plath and Wevill. In 1970, radical feminist poet Robin Morgan
Robin Morgan
Robin Morgan is a former child actor turned American radical feminist activist, writer, poet, and editor of Sisterhood is Powerful and Ms. Magazine....
published the poem "Arraignment", in which she openly accused Hughes of the battery and murder of Plath; other feminists threatened to kill him in Plath's name."Rhyme, reason and depression". (February 16, 1993). The Guardian. Accessed 2010-07-09.
In 1989, with Hughes under public attack, a battle raged in the letters pages of The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
and The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
. In The Guardian on April 20, 1989 Hughes wrote the article "The Place Where Sylvia Plath Should Rest in Peace": "In the years soon after [Plath's] death, when scholars approached me, I tried to take their apparently serious concern for the truth about Sylvia Plath seriously. But I learned my lesson early. [...] If I tried too hard to tell them exactly how something happened, in the hope of correcting some fantasy, I was quite likely to be accused of trying to suppress Free Speech. In general, my refusal to have anything to do with the Plath Fantasia has been regarded as an attempt to suppress Free Speech [...] The Fantasia about Sylvia Plath is more needed than the facts. Where that leaves respect for the truth of her life (and of mine), or for her memory, or for the literary tradition, I do not know."
On March 16, 2009, Nicholas Hughes
Nicholas Hughes
Nicholas Farrar Hughes was a fisheries biologist known as an expert in stream salmonid ecology. Hughes was the son of the American poet Sylvia Plath and English poet Ted Hughes and the younger brother of English artist and poet Frieda Hughes...
, the son of Plath and Hughes, hanged himself at his home in Alaska, following a history of depression.
Works
Plath wrote poetry from the age of eight, a poem that appeared in the Boston Traveller. By the time she arrived at Smith College she had written over fifty short stories and published in a raft of magazines. At Smith she majored in English and won all the major prizes in writing and scholarship. She edited the college magazine MademoiselleMademoiselle (magazine)
Mademoiselle was an influential women's magazine first published in 1935 by Street and Smith and later acquired by Condé Nast Publications....
and on her graduation in 1955, she won the Glascock Prize
Glascock Prize
The Glascock Poetry Prize is awarded to the winner of the annual Kathryn Irene Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Contest at Mount Holyoke College...
for Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea
Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea
"Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea" is a poem written by Sylvia Plath that was first published in 1955, the year she graduated from Smith College summa cum laude. It was awarded the Glascock Prize....
. Later at Newnham, Cambridge, she wrote for the Varsity
Varsity (Cambridge)
Varsity is the oldest of Cambridge University's main student newspapers. It has been published continuously since 1947, and is one of only three fully independent student newspapers in the UK. It appears every Friday around Cambridge...
magazine. By the time Heinmann
Heinemann (book publisher)
Heinemann is a UK publishing house founded by William Heinemann in Covent Garden, London in 1890. On William Heinemann's death in 1920 a majority stake was purchased by U.S. publisher Doubleday. It was later acquired by commemorate Thomas Tilling in 1961...
published her first collection, The Colossus and other poems in the UK in late in 1960, Plath had been short-listed several times in the Yale Younger Poets
Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition
The Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition is an annual event of Yale University Press aiming to publish the first collection of a promising American poet...
book competition and had had work printed in Harper's
Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine is a monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts, with a generally left-wing perspective. It is the second-oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the U.S. . The current editor is Ellen Rosenbush, who replaced Roger Hodge in January 2010...
, The Spectator
The Spectator
The Spectator is a weekly British magazine first published on 6 July 1828. It is currently owned by David and Frederick Barclay, who also owns The Daily Telegraph. Its principal subject areas are politics and culture...
and the Times Literary Supplement. All the poems in The Colossus had already been printed in major US and British journals and she had a contract with The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
. It was however her 1965 collection Ariel, published posthumously, on which Plath's reputation essentially rests.
In 1971, the volumes Winter Trees and Crossing the Water were published in the UK, including previously unseen nine poems from the original manuscript of Ariel. The Collected Poems, published in 1981, edited and introduced by Ted Hughes, contained poetry written from 1956 until her death. Plath was awarded the Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
for poetry, the first poet to win the prize posthumously. In 2006 Anna Journey
Anna Journey
Anna Journey is an American poet who was recently awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry.-Life:She graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University, with an MFA in creative writing....
, then a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University
Virginia Commonwealth University
Virginia Commonwealth University is a public university located in Richmond, Virginia. It comprises two campuses in the Downtown Richmond area, the product of a merger between the Richmond Professional Institute and the Medical College of Virginia in 1968...
, discovered a previously unpublished sonnet
Sonnet
A sonnet is one of several forms of poetry that originate in Europe, mainly Provence and Italy. A sonnet commonly has 14 lines. The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song" or "little sound"...
written by Plath entitled Ennui
Ennui (sonnet)
"Ennui" is a sonnet by Sylvia Plath published for the first time in November 2006 in the online literary journal Blackbird . Sylvia Plath wrote the Petrarchan sonnet “Ennui” during her undergraduate years at Smith College and may have intended to publish it, as she placed her name and address in...
. The poem, composed during Plath's early years at Smith College, is published in Blackbird, the online journal.Two poems entitled Ennui (I) and Ennui (II) are listed in a partial catalogue of Plath's juvenilia in the Collected Poems. A note explains that the texts of all but half a dozen of the many pieces listed are in the Sylvia Plath Archive of juvenilia in the Lilly Library
Lilly Library
The Lilly Library, located on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, is a large rare book and manuscript library in the United States.-History:...
at Indiana University. The rest are with the Sylvia Plath Estate.
Reception
The Colossus received largely positive UK reviews, highlighting her voice as new and strong, individual and American in tone. Peter DickinsonPeter Dickinson
Peter Malcolm de Brissac Dickinson OBE is an English author and poet who has written a wide variety of books, notably children's books and detective stories, over a long and distinguished career.-Life and work:...
at Punch
Punch (magazine)
Punch, or the London Charivari was a British weekly magazine of humour and satire established in 1841 by Henry Mayhew and engraver Ebenezer Landells. Historically, it was most influential in the 1840s and 50s, when it helped to coin the term "cartoon" in its modern sense as a humorous illustration...
called the collection "a real find" and "exhilarating to read", full of "clean, easy verse". Bernard Bergonzi
Bernard Bergonzi
Bernard Bergonzi is a British literary scholar, critic and poet. He is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Warwick and an expert on T. S. Eliot.He was born in London and studied at the University of Oxford...
at the Manchester Guardian said the book was an "outstanding technical accomplishment" with a "virtuoso' quality". From the point of publication she became a presence on the poetry scene. The book went on to be published in America in 1962 to less glowing reviews. Whilst her craft was generally praised, her writing was viewed as more derivative of other poets. Some later critics have described the first book as somewhat young, staid or conventional in comparison to the more free-flowing imagery and intensity of her later work.
It was Hughes' publication of Ariel in 1965 that precipitated Plath's rise to fame. 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.Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
and Life
Life (magazine)
Life generally refers to three American magazines:*A humor and general interest magazine published from 1883 to 1936. Time founder Henry Luce bought the magazine in 1936 solely so that he could acquire the rights to its name....
both reviewed the slim volume of Ariel in the wake of her death.The critic at Time said: "Within a week of her death, intellectual London was hunched over copies of a strange and terrible poem she had written during her last sick slide toward suicide. 'Daddy' was its title; its subject was her morbid love-hatred of her father; its style was as brutal as a truncheon. What is more, 'Daddy' was merely the first jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bile across the literary landscape. [...] Death like a Poem. In her most ferocious poems, 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus,' fear, hate, love, death and the poet's own identity become fused at black heat with the figure of her father, and through him, with the guilt of the German exterminators and the suffering of their Jewish victims. They are poems, as Robert Lowell says in his preface to Ariel, that 'play Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder.'"Plath has been criticized for her numerous and controversial allusions to the Holocaust
The Holocaust
The Holocaust , also known as the Shoah , was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi...
. See Boot in the Face: The Problem of the Holocaust in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath
Some in the feminist movement saw Plath as speaking for their experience, as a "symbol of blighted female genius". Writer Honor Moore
Honor Moore
Honor Moore is an American writer of poetry, creative nonfiction and plays.She is the author of three collections of poems: Red Shoes, Darling, and Memoir; two works of nonfiction, The White Blackbird and The Bishop's Daughter; and the play Mourning Pictures, which was produced on Broadway and...
describes Ariel as marking the beginning of a movement, Plath suddenly visible as "a woman on paper", certain and audacious. Moore says: "When Sylvia Plath’s Ariel was published in the United States in 1966, American women noticed. Not only women who ordinarily read poems, but housewives and mothers whose ambitions had awakened [...] Here was a woman, superbly trained in her craft, whose final poems uncompromisingly charted female rage, ambivalence, and grief, in a voice with which many women identified."
The United States Postal Service will introduce a postage stamp featuring Sylvia Plath in 2012.
Themes
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 ThomasDylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...
, W. B. Yeats and Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore was an American Modernist poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.- Life :Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of mechanical engineer and inventor...
. Late in 1959, when she and Hughes were at the Yaddo writers' colony in New York State, she wrote the seven-part "Poem for a Birthday", echoing Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke was an American poet, who published several volumes of poetry characterized by its rhythm, rhyming, and natural imagery. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954 for his book, The Waking.-Biography:...
's Lost Son sequence, though its theme is her own traumatic breakdown and suicide attempt at 21. 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 shot through with themes of death, redemption and resurrection. After Hughes left, Plath produced, in less than two months, the forty poems of rage, despair, love, and vengeance on which her reputation mostly rests.
The poems in Ariel
Ariel (Plath)
Ariel was the second book of Sylvia Plath's poetry to be published, and was originally published in 1965, two years after her death by suicide. The poems in the 1965 edition of Ariel, with their free flowing images and characteristically menacing psychic landscapes, marked a dramatic turn from...
mark a departure from her earlier work into a more personal arena of poetry. Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948...
's poetry may have played a part in this shift as she cited Lowell's 1959 book Life Studies
Life Studies
Life Studies is the fourth book of poems by Robert Lowell. Most critics consider it one of Lowell's most important books, and the Academy of American Poets named it one of their Groundbreaking Books. The book won the National Book Award for poetry in 1960.-Publication:Life Studies was first...
as a significant influence, in an interview just before her death.Wagner-Martin (1988) p184 Posthumously published in 1966, the impact of Ariel was dramatic, with its dark and potentially autobiographical descriptions of mental illness in poems such as '"Tulips
Tulips (poem)
"Tulips" is a poem by American poet Sylvia Plath. The poem was written in 1961 and included in the collection Ariel published in 1965.-Style and Structure:...
", "Daddy
Daddy (poem)
"Daddy" is a poem written by American poet Sylvia Plath. It was written on October 12, 1962, shortly before her death, and published posthumously in Ariel in 1965. The poem's implications and thematic concerns have been discussed academically with differing conclusions...
" and "Lady Lazarus
Lady Lazarus
"Lady Lazarus" is a poem written by Sylvia Plath, originally collected in the posthumously published volume Ariel, and is commonly used as an example of her writing style. Plath describes the speaker's oppression with the use of World War II Nazi Germany allusions and images. It is known as one of...
". Plath's work is often held within the genre of confessional poetry and the style of her work compared to other contemporaries, such as Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948...
and W.D. Snodgrass. Plath's close friend Al Alvarez
Al Alvarez
Al Alvarez is an English poet, writer and critic who publishes under the name A. Alvarez and Al Alvarez....
, who has written 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." Many of Plath's later poems deal with what one critic calls the "domestic surreal" in which Plath takes every day elements of life and twists the images, giving them an almost nightmarish quality.
Plath's fellow confessional poet and friend Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton was an American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967...
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-dramatization" and of self-pity
Self-pity
Self-pity is the psychological state of mind of an individual in perceived adverse situations who has not accepted the situation and does not have the confidence nor ability to cope with it. It is characterized by a person's belief that he or she is the victim of events and is therefore deserving...
. Revisionist critics such as Tracy Brain have, however, argued against a tightly autobiographical interpretation of Plath's material.
Journals and letters
Plath's letters were published in 1975, edited and selected by her mother Aurelia PlathAurelia Plath
Aurelia Plath was the wife of Otto Emile Plath, mother of the American poet, Sylvia Plath, and a son, Warren, and the grandmother of Frieda Hughes and Nicholas Hughes...
. 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.Kirk (2004) pxxi Plath had kept a diary from the age of 11 until her death, doing so until her suicide. Her adult diaries, starting from her first year at Smith College in 1950, were first 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 fiftieth anniversary of Plath's death.Kirk (2004) pxxii
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. Kukil finished her editing in December 1999, and in 2000 Anchor Books published The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. More than half of the new volume contained was newly released material; The American author Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates is an American author. Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over fifty novels, as well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction...
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)."
The Bell Jar
Plath's semi-autobiographical novel was published in 1963 and in the US in 1971, which her mother wished to block. 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 colour- 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 though 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". She dated a YaleYALE
RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...
senior named Dick Norton during her junior year. Norton, upon whom the character of Buddy in The Bell Jar
The Bell Jar
The Bell Jar is American writer and poet Sylvia Plath's only novel, which was originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963. The novel is semi-autobiographical with the names of places and people changed...
is based, contracted tuberculosis
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...
and was treated at the Ray Brook Sanatorium near Saranac Lake
Saranac Lake, New York
Saranac Lake is a village located in the state of New York, United States. As of the 2010 census, the population was 5,406. The village is named after Upper, Middle, and Lower Saranac Lakes, which are nearby....
. While visiting Norton, Plath broke her leg skiing, an incident that was fictionalized in the novel.
Hughes controversy
Still the subject of speculation and approbation, Hughes published Birthday Letters
Birthday Letters
Birthday Letters, published in 1998, is a collection of poetry by English poet and children's writer Ted Hughes. Released only months before Hughes's death, the collection won multiple prestigious literary awards...
in 1998, his own collection of 88 poems about his relationship with Plath. Hughes had published very little about his experience of the marriage and subsequent suicide and the book caused a sensation, being taken as his first explicit disclosure, topping best seller charts. It was not known at the volume's release that Hughes was suffering from terminal cancer and would die later that year. It went on to win the Forward Poetry Prize
Forward Poetry Prize
The Forward Poetry Prizes were created in 1991. The aim of the prizes is to extend the audience for contemporary poetry. Until the T.S. Eliot Prize remuneration was increased to £15,000 plus £1000 to each of nine runners-up, the Forward was the United Kingdom's most valuable annual poetry...
, the T. S. Eliot Prize
T. S. Eliot Prize
The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is awarded by the Poetry Book Society to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in...
for Poetry and the Whitbread Poetry. The poems, written after her death, in some cases long after, are an account of a failure, circling round a missing centre, trying to find a reason for why she took her own life.
Plath was portrayed by Gwyneth Paltrow
Gwyneth Paltrow
Gwyneth Kate Paltrow is an American actress and singer. She made her acting debut on stage in 1990 and started appearing in films in 1991. After appearing in several films throughout the decade, Paltrow gained early notice for her work in films such as Se7en and Emma...
in the 2003 film Sylvia
Sylvia (2003 film)
Sylvia is a 2003 British biographical drama film directed by Christine Jeffs and starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Jared Harris, and Michael Gambon. It tells the true story of the romance between prominent poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes...
. Frieda Hughes
Frieda Hughes
Frieda Rebecca Hughes is an English poet and painter. She has published seven children's books and four poetry collections and has had many exhibitions.-Early life:...
, now a poet and painter, who was two years old 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. In 2003, she published her poem "My Mother" in Tatler
Tatler
Tatler has been the name of several British journals and magazines, each of which has viewed itself as the successor of the original literary and society journal founded by Richard Steele in 1709. The current incarnation, founded in 1901, is a glossy magazine published by Condé Nast Publications...
:
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
From
Frieda Hughes
Frieda Rebecca Hughes is an English poet and painter. She has published seven children's books and four poetry collections and has had many exhibitions.-Early life:...
Poetry collections
The Colossus and Other Poems
The Colossus and Other Poems is a poetry collection by American poet Sylvia Plath, named after the poem The Colossus. It was first published in 1960.-Contents:The 44 poems presented here are in the published order #The Manor Garden...
(1960)
Ariel (Plath)
Ariel was the second book of Sylvia Plath's poetry to be published, and was originally published in 1965, two years after her death by suicide. The poems in the 1965 edition of Ariel, with their free flowing images and characteristically menacing psychic landscapes, marked a dramatic turn from...
(1961–1965)
Collected prose and novels
The Bell Jar
The Bell Jar is American writer and poet Sylvia Plath's only novel, which was originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963. The novel is semi-autobiographical with the names of places and people changed...
: A novel (1963), under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas"
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams is a collection of short stories by deceased poet and writer Sylvia Plath. It was initially published in 1977 as a collection of thirteen short stories, including the title story....
(1977)
Children's books
Sources
- Alexander, Paul. (1991).
Jillian Becker
Jillian Becker is a novelist, prize-winning story-writer, critic, journalist, lecturer, best known internationally as a writer, researcher, and authority on the subject of terrorism.-Life:...
. (2003).
Ronald Hayman
Ronald Hayman is a British critic, dramatist, and writer best known for his biographies.-Early life:Ronald Hayman was born on May 4, 1932 in Bournemouth, England to John and Sadie Hayman. He was educated at St Paul's School in London and at Trinity Hall, Cambridge University, where he earned a...
. (1991). The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath. Carol Publishing. ISBN 1559720689.
Barry Kyle
Barry Albert Kyle is an English theatre director, currently Honorary Associate Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, England, and Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Missouri–Kansas City....
. (1976). Sylvia Plath: A Dramatic Portrait Conceived and Adapted from Her Writings. Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0571106981.
Connie Ann Kirk
Connie Ann Kirk is an American author of over a dozen books. Specializing in biographies of famous authors, she has also written companion references and a children's picture book.-Personal life:...
. (2004). Sylvia Plath: A Biography. Greenwood Press. ISBN 0313332142.
Janet Malcolm
Janet Malcolm is an American writer and journalist on staff at The New Yorker magazine. She is the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession , In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer ....
. (1995). The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Vintage. ISBN 0679751408.
Diane Middlebrook
Diane Helen Wood Middlebrook was an American biographer, poet, and teacher. She taught feminist studies for many years at Stanford University. She is best known for critically acclaimed biographies of poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath , and jazz musician Billy Tipton...
. (2003). Her Husband: Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath, a Marriage. Viking Adult. ISBN 0670031879.
Erica Wagner
Erica Wagner is an American author and critic, living in London. She is the literary editor of The Times.-Biography:Erica Wagner was born in New York City in 1967. She grew up on the Upper West Side and went to the Brearley School...
. (2002). Ariel's Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and the Story of Birthday Letters
Birthday Letters
Birthday Letters, published in 1998, is a collection of poetry by English poet and children's writer Ted Hughes. Released only months before Hughes's death, the collection won multiple prestigious literary awards...
. W.W. Norton. ISBN 0393323013.
Profiles
- Plath profile from American Academy of Poets. Retrieved 2010-10-30
- Profile and poems of Sylvia Plath at the Poetry Foundation.
- Poetry Archive's biography, bibliography and poetry sound files. Retrieved 2010-10-30
- A celebration, this is Website for Sylvia Plath
- The British Library - Sylvia Plath read by Harriet Walter. Audio recordings of Plath's poetry with accompanying biography and discussion
- BBC profile and video. BBC archive. Plath reading "Lady Lazarus" from Ariel (sound file). Retrieved 2010-10-30
Works and archive
- Hughes and Plath archive at University of Victoria. Retrieved 2010-10-30
- Sylvia Plath drawings at The Mayor Gallery The Daily TelegraphThe Daily TelegraphThe Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...
. Retrieved 2011-10-25
Essays
- Essays on Plath by Joyce Carol OatesJoyce Carol OatesJoyce Carol Oates is an American author. Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over fifty novels, as well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction...
. Retrieved 2010-10-30 - Online Essays on Plath. Retrieved 2010-10-30
- Plath Profiles:An Interdisciplinary Journal for Sylvia Plath Studies (annual). Indiana University. Retrieved 2010-10-30
- "Hughes-Plath Family Tree" http://ragazine.cc/2011/08/nick-hughes