Sylvia Plath Author Biography
American Poet and Novelist, Known for The Bell Jar, her only Novel
Life and work of Sylvia Plath, best-known for her poetry and poems despite controversy due to her suicide.
Sylvia Plath was a renowned American poet whose brilliant career was cut short by her tragic suicide. Nearly 20 years after her death, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her Collected Poems. Two of her well-known books are The Colossus, Poetry Collection, 1960, and an autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar (pseudonym Victoria Lucas, 1963).
Early Life of Plath
Plath was born in Boston, Massachussetts, in 1932, a daughter of a German immigrant and biology professor, and her mother, a secondary school teacher. Her father died when she was eight. Close to her father, the trauma of his death inspired her to publish her first poem.
Writing, Eduction, and Depression
She published poetry and stories when she was 18, winning a scholarship to Smith College. While still at Smith College, she had bouts of depression and had a mental breakdown which became the subject of her autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. Despite illness, she returned to Smith College 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.
Plath and Ted Hughes
The couple lived briefly in the US after graduating from Cambridge, and Plath taught at Smith. 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. 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 and Her Poetry
Plath's poems focus on the themes of women's creativity and insanity. The pressures on her to conform - as a good wife and mother, a middle-class woman, and a 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.
Plath's Published Books After She Died
- Ariel, Poetry Collection, 1965
- Crossing the Water, Poetry 1971
- Winter Trees, 1971
- Collected Poems, edited by ex-husband Ted Hughes 1981
- The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1983
- Selected Poems, 1985
Suggested Additional 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)
Sources:
American Women's History by Doris Weatherford,Prentice Hall, 1994
Larousse Dictionary of Writers, edited by Rosemary Goring (1994)
