Sylvia Plath (1932 to 1963) was an American poet and novelist who is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry. She is best known for the collections “The Colossus and Other Poems” and “Ariel”, and for her only novel, “The Bell Jar”.
Plath was born on 27 October 1932 in Jamaica Plain, Boston. Her father, Otto Plath, was an entomologist and a professor of biology at Boston University. She wrote poetry from the age of eight and had her first poem printed in the “Boston Herald”. At Smith College she won the major writing prizes and spent a summer as a guest editor at the magazine “Mademoiselle”. After graduating in 1955 she went to Newnham College, Cambridge, as a Fulbright student. She married the poet Ted Hughes in London in 1956; they had two children, Frieda and Nicholas, and separated in 1962.
“The Colossus and Other Poems”, published by Heinemann in 1960, was the only volume of poetry to appear in her lifetime. “The Bell Jar”, a semi-autobiographical novel that draws on her summer at “Mademoiselle” and the breakdown that followed, came out in the UK in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Plath, who had suffered from severe depression, died by suicide in London on 11 February 1963, aged 30. The novel was reissued under her own name in 1966, reached the US in 1971 and has sold over three million copies. A film version directed by Larry Peerce was released in 1979.
Her reputation rests largely on “Ariel”, published in 1965, which includes “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”. Hughes prepared two further collections, “Crossing the Water” and “Winter Trees”, for publication in 1971. “The Collected Poems” followed in 1981 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982, making Plath the fourth person to receive the award posthumously. “Ariel: The Restored Edition” (2004) returned to the selection and arrangement of the poems as she had left them.
Her prose includes the story collection “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams” (1977), “Letters Home” (1975), edited by her mother, and “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath” (2000). She also wrote for children, including “The Bed Book”, illustrated by Quentin Blake. The short story “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom” was published in 2019, and “The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath”, edited by Peter K. Steinberg, in 2024. Gwyneth Paltrow played her in the 2003 film “Sylvia”.
