February 11th 2013 sees the 50th anniversary of the death of writer Sylvia Plath, famous as much for her tumultuous personal life as she is for her work. Born in Boston on 27th October 1932, Plath studied at Cambridge and married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956. Her most famous works include the collections The Colossus and Other Poems, Ariel and The Bell Jar. Plath suffered from depression for most of her adult life and committed suicide in 1963.
Aged eight, Plath had her first poem published in the children’s section of the Boston Herald. By the time Plath arrived at Smith College, she had been published in a variety of magazines and had written around fifty short stories.
At university, Plath frequently won prizes for her writing in addition to editing college magazines Mademoiselle and Varsity. Upon her graduation in 1955, she won the Glascock Prize for Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea. Her first collection of poetry, The Colossus and Other Poems, was published late in 1960.
Her second poetry collection Ariel was published posthumously in 1965 and truly catapulted her to fame. 1971 saw the volumes Winter Trees and Crossing the Water published which included nine previously unseen poems. Plath was the first poet to win the Pulitzer Prize posthumously for Collected Poems, edited and introduced by Ted Hughes, which contained poetry written from 1956 until her death. Following Plath’s junior year, in which she spent a month in New York as guest editor at Mademoiselle, disappointed by the experience, she made her first suicide attempt that summer.
Plath committed suicide a month after the 1963 publication of The Bell Jar, and since then it has been the centre of much speculation, placing Plath as either a tragic heroine, unable to cope with the pressures of modern life or as a feminist martyr, suppressed by the misogynistic culture of 1950s America.
Ted Hughes
Plath met Hughes at Cambridge. Hughes, mesmerised by Plath, proposed in 1956, with a daughter born in 1960 and a son in 1962. Plath suffered a miscarriage in 1961, an event addressed in Parliament Hill Fields. By this time, Plath’s literary success was soaring above Hughes’, the relationship turned sour and they separated in 1962.
Hughes was troubled by Plath even after her death, and was tormented by Plath fans who held him responsible for her suicide, angered by the way he dealt with her posthumous publications. He published Birthday Letters, a poetry collection dedicated to her. Hughes’ wrote Last Letter around 1998, an unfinished and poignant poem detailing the feelings he still had for Plath.
Depression
Plath suffered from depression for most of her adult life, perhaps due to her father’s death in 1940. Plath slashed her legs to test her courage over committing suicide. After months of therapy, Plath made her first documented suicide attempt in August 1953. She swallowed her mother’s sleeping pills and crawled under her house, only to be discovered three days later.
June 1961 saw Plath involved in a car crash, something she described as one of her many suicide attempts. On the morning of 11th February 1963, she sadly died of carbon monoxide poisoning, having put her head in an oven.