Age, Biography, and Wiki
Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. She is best known for her semi-autobiographical novel "The Bell Jar" and her poetry collections, which often dealt with themes of mental illness, identity, and personal struggle. Her life was marked by a tumultuous marriage to poet Ted Hughes and her struggles with depression, which ultimately led to her death at the age of 30 in 1963.
| Occupation | Essayist |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | 27 October 1932 |
| Age | 92 Years |
| Birth Place | Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Horoscope | Scorpio |
| Country | England |
| Date of death | 11 February, 1963 |
| Died Place | London, England |
Height, Weight & Measurements
There is limited specific information available about Sylvia Plath's height, weight, or body measurements. However, she was often described as petite and slender.
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Dating & Relationship Status
Sylvia Plath was married to Ted Hughes, a British poet, from 1956 until her death in 1963. Their relationship was marked by intense passion and turmoil, which deeply influenced both their lives and works.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Plath graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts and the University of Cambridge, England, where she was a student at Newnham College. Plath later studied with Robert Lowell at Boston University, alongside poets Anne Sexton and George Starbuck. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956, and they lived together in the United States and then in England. Their relationship was tumultuous and, in her letters, Plath alleges abuse at his hands. They had two children before separating in 1962.
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, Germany. Plath's father was an entomologist and a professor of biology at Boston University who wrote a book about bumblebees in 1934.
Otto Plath died on November 5, 1940, a week and a half after Sylvia'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. Raised as a Unitarian, Plath experienced a loss of faith after her father's death and remained ambivalent about religion throughout her life. 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 "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".
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.
The couple married on June 16, 1956, at St George's, Bloomsbury, 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.
Plath's semi-autobiographical novel—her mother wanted to block publication—was published in 1963 and in the US in 1971. Describing the compilation of the book to her mother, she wrote, "What I've done is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalizing to add color—it's a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown... I've tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar". She described her novel as "an autobiographical apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the past". Plath dated a Yale senior named Dick Norton during her junior year. Norton, upon whom the character of Buddy in The Bell Jar is based, contracted tuberculosis and was treated at the Ray Brook Sanatorium. While visiting Norton, Plath broke her leg skiing, an incident that was fictionalized in the novel. Plath also used the novel to highlight the issue of women in the workforce during the 1950s. She strongly believed in women's abilities to be writers and editors while society forced them to fulfill secretarial roles: "Now with me, writing is the first delight in life. I want time and money to write, both very necessary. I will not sacrifice my time to learn shorthand because I do not want any of the jobs which shorthand would open up, although those jobs are no doubt very interesting for girls who want them. I do not want the rigid hours of a magazine or publishing job. I do not want to type other people's letters and read their manuscripts. I want to type my own and write my own. So secretarial training is out for me. That I know. (Sylvia Plath's letter to her mother, 10 Feb 1955)"
Plath's letters were published in 1975, edited and selected by her mother Aurelia Plath. The collection Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 came out partly in response to the strong public reaction to the publication of The Bell Jar in America. Plath started writing in her diary on January 1, 1944, at the age of 11 and continued until her death by suicide in February 1963. Her early diaries remain unpublished and are currently at Indiana University Bloomington. Her adult diaries, starting from her first year at Smith College in 1950, were published in 1982 as The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Frances McCullough, with Ted Hughes as consulting editor. In 1982, when Smith College acquired Plath's remaining journals, Hughes sealed two of them until February 11, 2013, the 50th anniversary of Plath's death.
Radical feminist poet Robin Morgan published the poem "Arraignment", in which she openly accused Hughes of the battery and murder of Plath. Her book Monster (1972) "included a piece in which a gang of Plath aficionados are imagined castrating Hughes, stuffing his penis into his mouth and then blowing out his brains". Hughes threatened to sue Morgan. The book was withdrawn by the publisher Random House, but it remained in circulation among feminists. Other feminists threatened to kill Hughes in Plath's name and pursue a conviction for murder. Plath's poem "The Jailor", in which the speaker condemns her husband's brutality, was included in Morgan's 1970 anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement.
Still the subject of speculation and opprobrium in 1998, Hughes published Birthday Letters that year, his own collection of 88 poems about his relationship with Plath. Hughes had published very little about his experience of the marriage and Plath's suicide, and the book caused a sensation, being taken as his first explicit disclosure, and it topped bestseller charts. It was not known at the volume's release that Hughes had terminal cancer and would die later that year. The book won the Forward Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. The poems, written after Plath's death, in some cases long after, try to find a reason why Plath killed herself.
In October 2015, the BBC Two documentary Ted Hughes: Stronger Than Death examined Hughes' life and work; it included audio recordings of Plath reciting her own poetry. Their daughter Frieda spoke for the first time about her mother and father.
Sylvia Plath's early poems exhibit what became her typical imagery, using personal and nature-based depictions featuring, for example, the moon, blood, hospitals, fetuses, and skulls. They were mostly imitation exercises of poets she admired such as Dylan Thomas, W. B. Yeats and Marianne Moore. Late in 1959, when she and Hughes were at the Yaddo writers' colony in New York State, she wrote the seven-part "Poem for a Birthday", echoing Theodore Roethke's Lost Son sequence, though its theme is her own traumatic breakdown and suicide attempt at 21. After 1960 her work moved into a more surreal landscape darkened by a sense of imprisonment and looming death, overshadowed by her father. The Colossus is filled with themes of death, redemption and resurrection. After Hughes left, Plath produced, in less than two months, the 40 poems of rage, despair, love, and vengeance on which her reputation mostly rests.
It was the posthumous publication of Ariel in 1965 that precipitated Plath's rise to fame and helped establish her reputation as one of the 20th century's best poets. As soon as it was published, critics began to see the collection as the charting of Plath's increasing desperation or death wish. Her dramatic death became her most famous aspect and remains so. Time and Life both reviewed the slim volume of Ariel in the wake of her death. The critic at Time said: "Within a week of her death, intellectual London was hunched over copies of a strange and terrible poem she had written during her last sick slide toward suicide. 'Daddy' was its title; its subject was her morbid love-hatred of her father; its style was as brutal as a truncheon. What is more, 'Daddy' was merely the first jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bile across the literary landscape...In her most ferocious poems, 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus', fear, hate, love, death and the poet's own identity become fused at black heat with the figure of her father, and through him, with the guilt of the German exterminators and the suffering of their Jewish victims. They are poems, as Robert Lowell says in his preface to Ariel, that 'play Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder'." On January 16, 2004, The Independent in London published an article which ranked Ariel as the third best book of modern poetry among its Ten Best Modern Poetry Books.
Gwyneth Paltrow portrayed Plath in the biopic Sylvia (2003). Elizabeth Sigmund, who was friends with both Plath and Hughes, criticized the movie for depicting Sylvia as "a permanent depressive and a possessive person", but she conceded that "the film has an atmosphere towards the end of her life which is heartbreaking in its accuracy". Frieda Hughes, who was only two years old when she lost her mother, was angered by the making of entertainment featuring her parents' troubled marriage and her mother's death. She accused the "peanut crunching" public of wanting to be titillated by her family's tragedies. In 2003, Frieda reacted to the situation in the poem "My Mother", first published in Tatler: "Now they want to make a film For anyone lacking the ability To imagine the body, head in oven, Orphaning children
| Parents | |
| Husband | Ted Hughes (m. 1956) |
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Net Worth and Salary
Sylvia Plath's net worth at the time of her death was not substantial, given her relatively short career and the limited financial success of her work during her lifetime. However, her literary estate has grown significantly in value over the years due to the enduring popularity of her work. In recent years, personal items and letters have been sold for considerable sums, such as the collection sold by Sotheby's for over €900,000 in 2021.
Career, Business, and Investments
- Literary Career: Plath is celebrated for her vivid and emotionally charged writing style, which spans poetry and prose. Her novel "The Bell Jar" and poetry collections like "Ariel" are considered classics of American literature.
- Business and Investments: Despite her tragic early death, Plath's literary legacy continues to generate significant revenue through book sales, literary estates, and various adaptations of her work.
In 1950, Plath attended Smith College, a private women's liberal arts college in Massachusetts, where she excelled academically. While at Smith, she lived in Lawrence House, and 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. 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.
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. Plath took a job as a receptionist in the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital and in the evenings sat in on creative writing seminars given by poet Robert Lowell (also attended by the writers Anne Sexton and George Starbuck).
Plath wrote poetry from the age of 8, her first poem appearing in the Boston Traveller. By the time she arrived at Smith College, she had written over 50 short stories, and her work had been published in numerous magazines. At Smith, she majored in English literature and won all the major prizes in writing and scholarship, including literary prizes for her poetry. Additionally, she received a summer editor position at the young women's magazine Mademoiselle. On her graduation in 1955, she won the Glascock Prize for "Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea". Later, at Cambridge, she wrote for the university publication Varsity.
Social Network
Sylvia Plath passed away before the advent of modern social networks, but her work remains widely discussed and admired across platforms.
Plath met poet Ted Hughes on February 25, 1956. 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".
Plath's fellow confessional poet and friend Anne Sexton commented: "Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicide, in detail and in depth—between the free potato chips. Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem. Sylvia and I often talked opposites. We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric lightbulb, sucking on it. She told the story of her first suicide in sweet and loving detail, and her description in The Bell Jar is just that same story." The confessional interpretation of Plath's work has led to some dismissing certain aspects of her work as an exposition of sentimentalist melodrama; in 2010, for example, Theodore Dalrymple asserted that Plath had been the "patron saint of self-dramatisation" and of self-pity. Revisionist critics such as Tracy Brain have, however, argued against a tightly autobiographical interpretation of Plath's material. On January 16, 2004, The Independent newspaper in London published an article that ranked Ariel as the 3rd best book of modern poetry among 'The 10 Best Modern Poetry Books.'
Plath's voice is heard in a BBC documentary about her life, recorded in London in late 1962. Of the BBC recording Elizabeth Hardwick wrote: "I have never before learned anything from a poetic reading, unless the clothes, the beard, the girls, the poor or good condition of the poet can be considered a kind of knowledge. But I was taken aback by Sylvia Plath's reading. It was not anything like I could have imagined. Not a trace of the modest, retreating, humorous Worcester, Massachusetts, of Elizabeth Bishop; nothing of the swallowed plain Pennsylvania of Marianne Moore. Instead these bitter poems—'Daddy', 'Lady Lazarus', 'The Applicant', 'Fever 103°'—were beautifully read, projected in full-throated, plump, diction-perfect, Englishy, mesmerizing cadences, all round and rapid, and paced and spaced. Poor recessive Massachusetts had been erased. 'I have done it again!' Clearly, perfectly, staring you down. She seemed to be standing at a banquet like Timon, crying, 'Uncover, dogs, and lap!'"
Education
Plath attended Smith College, where she studied literature and began to develop her writing skills. She later attended Newnham College, Cambridge, on a Fulbright Scholarship.
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.
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 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.
An inquest was held on February 15 and concluded that the cause of death was suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. Hughes was devastated; they had been separated for six months, due to his affair with Assia Wevill. In a letter to an old friend of Plath's from Smith College, he wrote: "That's the end of my life. The rest is posthumous." Wevill also committed suicide, using a gas stove, six years later.
The Collected Poems, published in 1981, edited and introduced by Ted Hughes, contained poetry written from 1956 until her death. Plath posthumously was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In 2006, Anna Journey, then a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University, discovered a previously unpublished sonnet written by Plath titled "Ennui". The poem, composed during Plath's early years at Smith College, was published in the online journal Blackbird.
* Harriet Rosenstein research files on Sylvia Plath, 1910–2018, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University Libraries
Conclusion
Sylvia Plath's impact on literature is profound, and her work continues to inspire and influence writers around the world. While her personal net worth was limited during her lifetime, her literary legacy has grown significantly, ensuring her place as one of the most important American writers of the 20th century.
