Sylvia Plath

Born in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts, Plath graduated from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and then the University of Cambridge in England, where she was a Fulbright student at Newnham College. In 1959, Plath took a creative writing seminar taught by Robert Lowell at Boston University, alongside poets Anne Sexton and George Starbuck. Within this seminar, Plath, Lowell and Sexton, whilst starting with very different writing styles, each gravitated towards a new style of poetry dubbed confessional for its use of personal experience and its tendency to use a direct form of address. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956 in London. In 1957, they briefly moved to the United States, but moved back to England in the winter of 1959. They had two children, Frieda and Nicholas, before separating in 1962.

Critic Al Alvarez views Plath as part of a generation that helped establish a new artistic myth, in contrast to the Eliot generation, which championed the impersonality of art and the "extinction of personality". In his view Plath and her contemporaries fused their inner lives with their artistic output. Some in the feminist movement saw Plath as speaking for their experience, as a "symbol of blighted female genius". Plath suffered a lifelong battle with severe depression, often characterized as a bipolar-type illness, leading to multiple traumatic treatments with early model electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). She died by suicide at age 30 in London on February 11, 1963.

Biography

Early life and education

Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath (1906–1994), was the American-born daughter of Austrian immigrants, and her father, Otto Plath (1885–1940), was from Grabow in Prussia, German Empire. Plath's father was an entomologist and a professor of biology at Boston University who wrote a book about bumblebees in 1934.

On April 27, 1935, Plath's brother Warren Joseph was born. In 1936 the family moved from 24 Prince Street in Jamaica Plain to 92 Johnson Avenue, Winthrop, Massachusetts. Since 1920, Plath's maternal grandparents, the Schobers, had lived in a section of Winthrop called Point Shirley, a location mentioned in Plath's poetry.

Based on her poetry and journals, the power dynamic between Plath’s parents was characterized by a strict, patriarchal structure in which her father, Otto Plath, held absolute authority, while her mother, Aurelia Plath, was perceived as a subservient yet ultimately managing figure. Plath’s work, particularly “Daddy”, presents this dynamic as a source of deep emotional trauma where her father is viewed as an oppressive “god” and her mother as a passive figure.

Otto Plath died on November 5, 1940, a week and a half after his daughter'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. Plath’s outlook on religion and lifestyle changed dramatically due to his strict atheism and controlling demeanor, and his premature death led Plath to believe her “sky is empty”. Her father was buried in Winthrop Cemetery in Massachusetts. A visit to her father's grave later prompted Plath to write the poem "Electra on Azalea Path".

After Otto's death, Aurelia moved her children and her parents to 26 Elmwood Road, Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1942. Plath commented in her essay "Ocean 1212-W", one of her final works, that her first nine years "sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth".

Plath published her first poem at the age of eight in the Boston Herald's children's section. Over the next few years, Plath published multiple poems in regional magazines and newspapers. At age 11, Plath began keeping a journal. 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. "Even in her youth, Plath was ambitiously driven to succeed."

Plath attended Bradford Senior High School, which is now Wellesley High School in Wellesley, Massachusetts, graduating in 1950. An influential English teacher was Wilbury Crockett, who she referred to as "my own Mr. Crockett". Just after graduating from high school, she had her first national publication in The Christian Science Monitor.

College years and depression

In 1950, Plath attended Smith College, a private women's liberal arts college in Massachusetts, where she excelled academically. While at Smith, she first lived in Haven House and later in Lawrence House, where a plaque can be found outside her old room. She edited The Smith Review. After her third year of college, Plath was awarded a coveted position as a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine, during which she spent a month in New York City. Plath was one of twenty women offered the position, which entailed writing short stories and interviewing people such as Elizabeth Bowen in Cambridge. The experience was not what she had hoped for, and many of the events that took place during that summer were later used as inspiration for her novel The Bell Jar.

She was furious at not being at a meeting that Mademoiselle editor Cyrilly Abels had arranged with Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, a writer whose work she loved, according to one of her boyfriends, "more than life itself". She loitered around the White Horse Tavern and the Chelsea Hotel for two days, hoping to meet Thomas, but he was already on his way home. A few weeks later, she slashed her legs "to see if she had enough courage to kill herself." During this time, she was not accepted into a Harvard University writing seminar with author Frank O'Connor. Following ECT for depression, Plath made her first medically documented suicide attempt on August 24, 1953, by crawling under the front porch and taking her mother's sleeping pills.

She survived this first suicide attempt, 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 Ruth Beuscher. Her stay at McLean Hospital and her Smith scholarship were paid for by the author Olive Higgins Prouty, who had also recovered from a mental breakdown. According to Plath's biographer Andrew Wilson, Olive Higgins Prouty "would take Dr. Tillotson to task for the badly managed ECT, blaming him for Sylvia's suicide attempt".

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 Dostoyevsky's Novels, and in June graduated from Smith with an A.B., summa cum laude. She was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society, and had an IQ of around 160.

She obtained a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College, one of the two women-only colleges of the University of Cambridge in England, where she lived in Whitstead, a detached house situated on the edge of the college grounds. Plath 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 traveling around Europe.

Career and marriage

Plath met poet Ted Hughes on February 25, 1956, at a party to launch a poetry journal, St. Botolph's Review. In a 1961 BBC interview now held by the British Library Sound Archive, Plath describes how she met Hughes:

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.

Plath described Hughes as "a singer, story-teller, lion and world-wanderer" with "a voice like the thunder of God".

The couple were married only four months after they met, on June 16, 1956, at St George the Martyr in Holborn, London, and in honor of Bloomsday, with Plath's mother as the sole witness. They spent their honeymoon in Paris and Benidorm, Spain. 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 June 1957, Plath and Hughes moved to the United States; beginning in September, Plath taught at Smith College, her alma mater. She found it difficult to both teach and have enough time and energy to write, and in the middle of 1958, the couple moved to Boston, where they lived at 9 Willow St. in Beacon Hill. Plath took a job as a receptionist in the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital and in the evenings attended a creative writing seminar 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 personal experience. She openly discussed her depression with Lowell and her suicide attempt with Sexton, who led her to write from a more female perspective. Plath began to consider herself as a more serious, focused writer. At this time, Plath and Hughes 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.

In summer 1959, Plath and Hughes went on an eight-week camping trip across Canada, the United States and Mexico, after which they stayed at the Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, in fall. Plath stated that at Yaddo 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 England in December 1959 and lived in London at 3 Chalcot Square, near the Primrose Hill area of Regent's Park, where an English Heritage plaque records Plath's residence from 1960-1961. Their daughter Frieda Rebecca was born on April 1, 1960, and in October, Plath published The Colossus, her first collection of poetry.

In February 1961, Plath's second pregnancy ended in miscarriage; several of her poems, including "Parliament Hill Fields", address this event. In August, she finished her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar; immediately afterwards, the family moved to Court Green in the small market town of North Tawton, Devon. Her son Nicholas Farrar was born on January 17, 1962. In mid-1962, Plath and Hughes began to keep bees, which would become the subject of many of her poems, including “Beekeeper’s Daughter,” “Arrival of the Bee Box,” “The Bee Meeting,” “Stings,” and “Swarm”.

Before moving away from London in August 1961, the couple sublet their flat at Chalcot Square to the Canadian poet David Wevill and his wife Assia (née Gutmann) Wevill. The couples became friends, and Plath and Hughes invited the Wevills to visit them at their new house in Devon in May 1962. Hughes was immediately struck with Assia, as she was with him. In July 1962, Plath discovered Hughes was having an affair with Wevill. In September, as a last attempt to save their relationship, Plath and Hughes traveled to Cleggan in Ireland to visit the poet Richard Murphy. The pair then embarked on a ten-day trip to Spain, where Plath and Hughes previously spent their honeymoon. In October, Plath and Hughes separated for good, and Hughes moved back to London, leaving Plath and their children behind in Devon.

In the final months of her life, beginning in October 1962, Plath experienced a great burst of creativity and composed most of the poems on which her reputation now rests, writing at least 26 of the poems of her second collection Ariel, which would be published posthumously (1965 in the UK, 1966 in the US). In December 1962, she returned alone to London with their children and rented, on a five-year lease, a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road—around the corner from her previous flat at Chalcot Square. William Butler Yeats once lived in the house, which bears an English Heritage blue plaque for the Irish poet. Plath was pleased by this fact and considered it a good omen.

The winter of 1962–1963 was one of the coldest on record in the UK; the pipes froze, the children—now two years old and nine months—were often sick, and the house had no telephone. Her depression returned, but she kept on writing poetry, which would be published after her death. Her only novel, The Bell Jar, was published in January 1963 under the pen name Victoria Lucas, to protect the identities of the real people the characters were based on and Plath herself in case of poor reception. The Bell Jar was met with critical indifference.

Final depressive episode and death

Plath's live-in nurse was due to arrive at nine on the morning of February 11, 1963, to help 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. They found Plath dead with her head on the oven door, having sealed the kitchen door and the room upstairs with her sleeping children inside with tape, towels, and cloths. She was 30 years old.

Before her death, Plath had tried at least once to take her own life. On August 24, 1953, she overdosed on sleeping pills. In June 1962, she drove her car off the side of the road into a nearby clearing after learning about Hughes' and Wevill's affair. The poetry critic and Plath's friend Al Alvarez always maintained that Plath told him it was a suicide attempt, but another friend claimed that Plath herself described the incident as "not a conscious suicide but a blind destructive urge over which she had no conscious control" and Hughes himself told Alvarez that it was a minor accident due to a "feverish blackout".

In January 1963, Plath spoke with John Horder, her general practitioner. She described the current depressive episode she was experiencing; it had been ongoing for six or seven months. While for most of the time she had been able to continue working, her depression had worsened and become severe, "marked by constant agitation, suicidal thoughts and inability to cope with daily life." Plath struggled with insomnia, taking medication at night to induce sleep, and frequently woke up early. She had lost 20 pounds (9 kg) in a short time. However, she continued to take care of her physical appearance and did not outwardly speak of feeling guilty or unworthy.

Horder prescribed her an anti-depressant, a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, a few days before her suicide. Knowing she was at risk with two young children, he made strenuous efforts to have her admitted to a hospital; when that failed, he arranged for a live-in nurse.

Hughes claimed in a hand-written note to the literary critic Keith Sagar, discovered in 2001, that the anti-depressants prescribed were a "key factor" in Plath's suicide. He said Plath had previously had an adverse reaction to a prescription she had taken when they lived in the U.S. These pills were sold in England under a different name, and although Hughes did not name the pills explicitly, he claimed a new doctor had prescribed them to Plath without realizing she had taken them before with adverse effects. Several commentators have argued that because anti-depressants may take up to three weeks to take effect, her prescription from Horder would not have taken full effect prior to her death; however, others have pointed out that adverse effects of anti-depressants can begin immediately.

Plath's intentions have been debated. That morning, she asked her downstairs neighbor, art historian Trevor Thomas (1907–1993), what time he would be leaving. She also left a note reading "Call Dr. Horder", including the doctor's phone number. It is argued Plath turned on the toxic coal gas oven at a time when Thomas would have been likely to see the note, but the escaping gas seeped downstairs and also rendered Thomas unconscious while he slept. However, in her biography Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath, Plath's 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." 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." Plath had described the quality of her despair as "owl's talons clenching my heart".

Aftermath

An inquest was held on February 15 and concluded that the cause of death was suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. Plath's gravestone in Heptonstall's parish churchyard of St. Thomas the Apostle bears the inscription that Hughes chose for her: "Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted." Biographers have attributed the source of the quote to the 16th-century novel Journey to the West written by Wu Cheng'en.

Eight years after the death of Plath, Al Alvarez wrote that Plath's suicide was not intentional and was "a cry for help which fatally misfired". This prompted an angry response from Hughes who demanded that this claim be withdrawn from wider publication. In a BBC interview in March 2000, Alvarez spoke about his failure to recognize Plath's depression, saying he regretted his inability to offer her emotional support.

Plath's daughter Frieda Hughes is a writer and artist, who has now released seven children’s books. She has no children and resides in Abermule, Powys, Wales. On March 16, 2009, Plath's son Nicholas Hughes, who was a fisheries biologist, died by suicide at his home in Fairbanks, Alaska, following a history of depression.