Sylvia Plath

27 October 1932 - 11 February 1963

SP was primarily a poet, and most famously a confessional poet, although she also wrote a novel, a radio play, short stories and a book for children. She is best known for the poems she wrote in the last eighteen months that she lived. Her life story, complete with her suicide at the age of thirty, tends to overshadow her literary achievement, although critics of recent decades have made strides towards preserving her literary contribution and promoting its value.

BirthName: Sylvia Plath
Married: Hughes
Because of Ted Hughes' role as literary executor to SP 's estate, he and his sister Olwyn exerted as much control over published biographies as possible, and suppressed some of Plath's journals and letters from the public domain. Even since the publication in 2000 of the complete surviving journals, there remain lacunae in the Plath biography.

Milestones

27 October 1932

SP was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the elder of two children.

Plath, Aurelia, and Sylvia Plath. “Introduction”. Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, Harper and Row, 1975, pp. 3-40.

10 August 1941

SP 's first published poem, Hear the Crickets Chirping, appeared in a letter to the Boston Sunday Herald when she was eight years old.

Tabor, Stephen. Sylvia Plath: An Analytical Bibliography. Meckler, 1987.

102

Butscher, Edward. Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness. Seabury Press, 1976.

14 January 1963

SP 's novel, The Bell Jar, appeared under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, less than a month before her suicide.

Tabor, Stephen. Sylvia Plath: An Analytical Bibliography. Meckler, 1987.

11 February 1963

SP committed suicide by gassing herself in her London flat.

Hayman, Ronald. The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath. Heinemann, 1991.

182

28 September 1981

SP 's Collected Poems were published, nearly twenty years after her death: they were edited with an introduction by Ted Hughes .

Tabor, Stephen. Sylvia Plath: An Analytical Bibliography. Meckler, 1987.

54-7

Early 2000

The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962, edited by Karen V. Kukil , appeared after the death of Plath's husband, Ted Hughes : the first printing of the entire corpus of Plath's surviving journals.

Rose, Jacqueline. “So many lives, so little time for a desperate poet”. Guardian Weekly, 13–19 Apr. 2000, p. 17.

Biography

Birth and Family

27 October 1932

SP was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the elder of two children.

Plath, Aurelia, and Sylvia Plath. “Introduction”. Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, Harper and Row, 1975, pp. 3-40.