10 Real Facts About Sylvia Plath Biography

Sylvia Plath Biography is very important for every english literature pupil.you can understand her poetry if you know her background and suppression of mind.We will discuss in this article the background of Plath life.

The daughter of scholarly parents, Sylvia Plath published her first poem at the age of eight in the Boston Sunday Herald. She continued to write, and while a professional writer for only the last seven years of her brief life, she created a plethora of work. In that short seven year span she finished more than two hundred and fifty poems, several commissioned nonfiction works for magazines and the BBC, possibly as many as seventy short stories, a verse play, a children’s book, a novel, and at least one draft of a second novel. In between,she penned an extensive journal and an abundance of letters that were written mostly to her mother.

Aurelia Schober, Plath’s mother, was an avid reader who taught English and German at a high school. A German whose parents were from Austria, she met her husband, Otto Plath, at Boston University, where she was a student in one of his classes. Otto had emigrated to New York City from Germany as an adolescent. The two were married in January 1932 and continued to live in Boston.

Sylvia was born on October 27, 1932; her brother Warren was born two-and-a-half years later. The family moved to Winthrop,Massachusetts, when Sylvia was four to be closer to the sea and to Aurelia’s parents. Otto Plath suffered from what appeared to be lung cancer; in fact he had treatable diabetes. By the time he received the proper medical attention, he was forced to have a leg amputated as a result of what had started as a gangrenous toe. He never returned home from the hospital after the operation, however, but died from an embolism.

It was 1940, both children were still young, and Aurelia’s parents moved in with the now-smaller family to provide
additional support. Shortly thereafter, when Aurelia was offered a teaching post at a university, the extended family moved inland to Wellesley, Massachusetts.

If You Are Students of Literature, You Must Know The Secrets Behind Sylvia Plath Biography

Sylvia entered Smith College in 1950, receiving three scholarships in her first year. From Smith, Plath wrote home: “I could just cry with happiness. . . . The world is splitting open at my feet like a ripe, juicy watermelon.” At the same time, however, her letters reported episodes of severe depression.

In June of 1953 Plath fell into a great depression when she learned she had not been accepted in Frank O’Connor’s summer school writing course at Harvard. Bereft, she left her mother a note saying she was going off on a long walk and would return the following day. Then she carefully hid herself in their basement, where she took an
overdose of sleeping pills. Three days later Plath was heard moaning, found semiconscious, revived, and hospitalized.

Plath returned to Smith in the spring of 1954 and was one of only four students to graduate that June with the highest possible grade point average. Winning a Fulbright scholarship to Newham College in Cambridge, England, she set off and immediately built again a very active and very social life. By June of 1956 she had married Ted
Hughes, then a relatively unknown poet. She described Hughes as “the only man in the world who is my match.”

Upon graduating from Cambridge, Plath and her husband moved back to the States, where Plath took up teaching at Smith. Rather exhausted after the first year there and determined to do more writing, Plath and Hughes moved to Boston. The couple returned to England when they found out Sylvia was pregnant, and she gave birth to their daughter, Freida Rebecca, in April 1960. Just prior to the birth, Plath signed a contract for publication in England of her first book of poetry, The Colossus and Other Poems. In 1961 Plath suffered from a miscarriage and from having her appendix removed in emergency surgery. But shortly thereafter, Alfred Knopf bought the rights to produce Th Colossus in the United States, and Plath quickly received favorable attention and a sizable writing grant froman American foundation. She began working intently on The Bell Jar, a novel that contains much autobiographical detail about her near-suicide at age twenty.

By late summer, the couple had moved to the countryside, into a manor house in Devon. While Plath had felt exhilarated after the birth of her first child, she felt strained after giving birth to a son, Nicholas, in January 1962. In May of that year, the Hughes’s friends David and Assia Wevill visited them. Plath later learned of an attraction between her husband and Assia. Angered, she burned her manuscript for a second novel that contained many elements about her romance and marriage to Hughes.

May 1962 had also been the month The Colossus was released for publication in the United States. In an effort to expend her energy  positively, Plath wrote essays, book reviews, and finished her radio play, Three Women. She had jubilantly been working to build her husband’s writing career; now she honed in on her own.

By August, the couple planned to divorce. Only a few days after making this decision, Plath drove her car off the road, yet was unharmed. By October, Hughes had moved out and Plath rented an apartment in London, where she was most pleased to know one of her favorite poets, William Butler Yeats, had lived. It was here that she wrote feverishly each morning, completing at least one poem a day that month. Few needed much revising, and all embraced a revolutionary new voice. “I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name,” Plath wrote to her mother, and critics would concur years later when they read the work. “Terrific stuff, as if domesticity had choked me,” Plath wrote home. At the same time, she was working on her third novel, Double Exposure.

Sylvia Plath Biography And Ted Hughes Role

In January of 1963 The Bell Jar was published in London under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. While many reviewers wrote of it favorably, Plath was disappointed that they seemed oblivious to the primary focus on the main character’s recovery and rebirth. The poems she sent to publications at this time were slow to be received, also adding to her frustration. Disillusioned from her crumbled marriage, burdened financially, struggling to care for two young children, and affected by the medication she was taking, Plath took many sleeping pills and allowed herself to be consumed by the fumes from the gas oven. She had left a note asking that her doctor be called, and indicating his name and number. As a result, many people assume that she was expecting to be found and revived again, as she had been at 20, especially because the children’s nurse was to be at the house early in the morning. However, she was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital that morning of April 11, 1963.

Ted Hughes, still legally Plath’s husband, then took control of her work, getting Ariel published in 1965. While Plath had carefully chosen the poetry to include in this book, ending it with her bee poems and their focus on rebirth, Hughes made his own decisions about what to include and in what order, ending the book with
imagery of the inevitability of death. In 1971 Hughes published Crossing the Water, which contains Plath’s poetry that was written after The Colossus and up to July 1962.

Aurelia Plath compiled and edited some of her daughter’s letters; these were then published in 1975 as Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963. It took until 1981 for a comprehensive collection of Sylvia Plath’s work to appear, The Collected Poems, which became one of the few works that has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize posthumously. Plath’s unabridged journals will be published shortly. They had been sealed from the public by Ted Hughes until a month before he died in 1998.

Sylvia Plath was an influential American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Here’s a brief tabular biography highlighting key aspects of her life:

This table summarizes the key points of Sylvia Plath’s life and career, though there’s much more depth to her story, literary works, and influence.