Sylvia Plath Plath was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts to middle class parents. Her father, a college professor, died when she was eight. She was highly intelligent, extremely compassionate and sensitive to everything and everyone around her. A perfectionist, she was very popular in school and a straight ‘A’ student. She was also an accomplished writer, having compiled an impressive list of publications by the time she entered Smith College in 1950 on a scholarship. Plath was to write more than 400 poems during her years at Smith. During the summer following her junior year, she went to New York to work as a student “guest editor” at Mademoiselle Magazine. Upon her return to Smith, she attempted suicide by swallowing sleeping pills. She later shared this experience in The Bell Jar, an autobiographical novel published in 1963.
Plath returned to the academic scene following a period of recovery involving electroshock treatment and psychotherapy. Graduating from Smith with honors she continued her studies at Cambridge, England under a Fulbright scholarship.
In 1956, Plath married English poet Ted Hughes and settled in the country village of Devon, but less then two years after the birth of their first child the marriage broke apart. In 1960 she published her first book, The Colossus. Although the poems in this book were well wrought, they gave only glimpses of what was to come in the poems she began writing in 1961.
The bitter cold winter of 1962-63, found Plath living in a small London flat. She now had two children, was ill with flu and low on money. Her need to write increased by the hard turn her life had taken. Often writing in the early morning hours before her children awoke, she sometimes finished a poem a day. Plath found herself stranded in the physic wasteland that undoubtedly developed out of the death of her father. In these last poems, death became a force more powerful than ever and on February 11, 1963, at the age of 30, she killed herself with cooking gas…just a month after The Bell Jar was published.
Two years later Ariel, a collection of some of her last poems, was published; followed by Crossing the Water and Winter Trees in 1971, and, in 1981, Ted Hughes edited The Collected Poems; Poppies in July was written in July of 1962. Plath didn’t consider The Bell Jar a “serious work” and published it under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas.
“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream…How did I know that someday–at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere–the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?
- Sylvia Plath
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