Sylvia Plath

Otto Plath came from Grabow in Prussia, taught biology at Boston University and published a book on bumblebees in 1934. When a close friend died of lung cancer he compared symptoms, decided he had it too, and ignored the diabetes until it cost him a foot. He died of the complications on November 5, 1940, a week and a half after his daughter's eighth birthday. She had already published a poem in the Boston Herald. She started a journal at 11, took a scholarship to Smith in 1950, edited the Smith Review, and was one of 20 young women picked as guest editors at Mademoiselle for a month in New York in the summer of 1953. It did not go the way she had hoped.

That August she took her mother's sleeping pills and crawled under the front porch. She spent six months in psychiatric care, including McLean Hospital, paid for by the novelist Olive Higgins Prouty. She went back, wrote a thesis on the double in Dostoevsky, graduated summa cum laude in 1955 and took a Fulbright to Cambridge. She met Ted Hughes at a party for a new poetry magazine on February 25, 1956, and married him four months later on Bloomsday, her mother the only witness. Robert Lowell's seminar at Boston University, which she took alongside Anne Sexton and George Starbuck, gave her permission to use her own life as material. The Colossus appeared in 1960. Then, alone in Devon from October 1962, she wrote at least 26 of the poems that became Ariel in a matter of weeks.

Letters to her therapist allege that Hughes was physically and emotionally abusive, and that he beat her two days before her 1961 miscarriage. In July 1962 she learned about Assia Wevill, who had sublet their flat. That June she had driven her car off the road. Al Alvarez called it a suicide attempt, a friend an uncontrollable urge, Hughes a feverish blackout. That winter was among the coldest on record in Britain. The pipes froze, the children were two and nine months and often sick, and she had lost 20 pounds. Her doctor prescribed an antidepressant, could not get her a hospital bed, and hired a nurse. On the morning of February 11, 1963, she sealed the kitchen and the children's room, left a note reading Call Dr. Horder, and put her head in the gas oven. She was 30.

They were still legally married, so Hughes inherited everything she had written. He rearranged Ariel before Faber published it in 1965, dropping poems and adding others, and it made her famous. He destroyed the journal covering the winter of 1962 to her death, saying he did not want the children to read it. Another journal and an unfinished novel went missing. The stone at Heptonstall reads Sylvia Plath Hughes, and people have repeatedly tried to chisel off the second surname — after each attack Hughes had the stone taken away for repair, sometimes leaving the grave unmarked. The Collected Poems won the Pulitzer in 1982. Faber restored her own ordering of Ariel in 2004, with a foreword by her daughter.

Sylvia Plath's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Colossus and Other Poems book
  The only collection published in her lifetime 1960
• The Bell Jar book
  Published a month before her death under the name Victoria Lucas, and met with indifference 1963
• Ariel book
  Posthumous, and reordered by Ted Hughes from the manuscript on her desk 1965
• The Collected Poems book
  Edited by Hughes. It won the Pulitzer for poetry in 1982 1981
• Ariel: The Restored Edition book
  Her own selection and order, printed for the first time, with a foreword by Frieda Hughes 2004
• The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath book
  More than half of it new. Hughes unsealed the journals shortly before his death 2000

• November 5, 1940 aged 8 Otto Plath dies of complications from an amputated foot He had convinced himself he had lung cancer and left the diabetes untreated.
• 1950 aged ~18 Enters Smith College on scholarship
• August 24, 1953 aged 20 First documented suicide attempt, under the front porch Six months of psychiatric care followed, including a stay at McLean Hospital.
• February 25, 1956 aged 23 Meets Ted Hughes at a party for St. Botolph's Review
• June 16, 1956 aged 23 Marries Hughes on Bloomsday in Holborn, her mother the only witness
• October 1960 aged 27 The Colossus published Her daughter Frieda had been born that April.
• July 1962 aged 29 Learns of Hughes's affair with Assia Wevill They separated for good in October. She wrote most of Ariel in the months after.
• January 1963 aged 30 The Bell Jar is published under a pen name
• February 11, 1963 aged 30 Dies in her London flat at 30 The inquest four days later recorded suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

• Emily Dickinson 1830–1886
  Reclusive poet whose innovative use of form and slant rhyme made her one of America's greatest literary voices. the American poet she is most often set beside
• Frederick Law Olmsted 1822–1903
  Landscape architect who designed Central Park and established public parks as essential American civic infrastructure. also a patient at McLean Hospital
• Betty Friedan 1921–2006
  Author of The Feminine Mystique and founding president of the National Organization for Women. published on the same condition in 1963
• Joan Didion 1934–2021
  Essayist and novelist whose precise prose captured the anxiety and disillusionment of American life. later reporter of the interior life