Sylvia Plath, a precocious enigma of the 1960s, battled perfectionism and precipitous mood swings while pursuing a career as a teacher and poet. She was born in Jamaica Plain, a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1932. In early childhood, she lived in Winthrop on Massachusetts Bay. Left fatherless at age 8, she lived with her mother’s parents and attended school in Winthrop and college at Wellesley. She later acknowledged uncertainty about her father through bee imagery in “Stings,” “The Swarm,” “The Bee Meeting,” and other poems.
After publishing the story “And Summer Will Not Come Again” in Seventeen magazine and the poem “Bitter Strawberries” in Christian Science Monitor in 1950, Plath earned a scholarship to Smith College and majored in English literature and composition. She published additional poems in Harper’s. A subsequent story, “Sunday at the Mintons,” won a Mademoiselle scholarship, a position on the magazine’s college board, and a summer internship in New York.
In August 1953, Plath attempted suicide. She underwent electroconvulsive therapy at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. She returned to Smith in February 1954 and earned a B.A. in English, graduating summa cum laude with membership in Phi Beta Kappa. She subsequently studied English literature as a Fulbright scholar at Newnham College, Cambridge, and then married British poet Ted Hughes in June 1956.
Plath taught at Smith, then worked as a hospital secretary in Boston while concentrating on writing. Her diary captures the negativism that paralyzed and bedeviled her. She felt lonely and isolated at school. The best she could offer her bruised self was a grade of “middling good.” The year after Ted Hughes published a critical success, The Hawk in the Rain, she failed twice, neither earning a Saxton Fellowship nor publishing verse.
After seeking guidance from Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, Plath won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959. She continued working in the clerical department of Massachusetts General Hospital while undergoing therapy. The family returned to London in December 1959, months before the birth of daughter Frieda Rebecca and a subsequent move to a Devon manor house. Plath published The Colossus and Other Poems (1962) and completed a radio play, Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices (1962), and The Bell Jar (1963). The latter, a powerful psychological novel and autobiographical study of schizophrenia, she issued under the pen name Victoria Lucas.
Plath entered a productive period in 1962, when a renewed vigor and daring took her into ever-deepening levels of psychic expression. Her health and emotional stability declined with the birth of a son, Nicholas Farrar. She was antagonized by her husband’s adulteries, and she burned a stack of manuscripts (her own and Hughes’) and filed for divorce. Seeking renewal in the visionary works of William Butler Yeats, she moved the children to Chalk Farm in London. During a wretched winter, after supplying each crib with a mug of milk and stuffing the crevices with towels, on February 11, 1963, she committed suicide by overdosing on barbiturates and inhaling gas from the kitchen stove.
Plath was much missed. Her friend, poet Anne Sexton, composed a Unitarian eulogy and wrote a verse tribute. Literary fans and cultists welcomed posthumous publication of Ariel (1965), a verse study of the patriarchy of her husband and father. Additional titles—Crossing the Water: Transitional Poems (1971), Winter Trees (1972), and Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950–1963 (1975), edited by her mother—strengthened Plath’s place among feminists. Hughes issued his ex-wife’s prose (minus one he chose to destroy) in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and Other Prose Writings (1977), The Collected Poems (1981), and The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982). On the strength of these works, Plath earned the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Her work continues to influence the writings of a new generation of feminists.
