Table Of ContentSYLVIA PLATH
Literary Lives
General Editor: Richard Dutton, Professor of English,
Lancaster University
This series offers stimulating accounts of the literary careers of the
most admired and influential English-language authors. Volumes
follow the outline of the writers' working lives, not
in the spirit of traditional biography, but aiming to trace
the professional, publishing and social contexts which
shaped their writing.
A list of the published titles in the series follows overleaf
Published titles
Morris Beja Leonee Ormond
JAMES JOYCE ALFRED TENNYSON
Cedric C. Brown Harold Pagliaro
JOHN MILTON HENRY FIELDING
Peter Davison George Parfitt
GEORGE ORWELL JOHN DONNE
Richard Dutton Gerald Roberts
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
Jan Fergus Felicity Rosslyn
JANE AUSTEN ALEXANDER POPE
James Gibson Tony Sharpe
THOMAS HARDY T. S. ELIOT
Kenneth Graham Tony Sharpe
HENRY JAMES WALLACE STEVENS
Paul Hammond Grahame Smith
JOHN DRYDEN CHARLES DICKENS
W David Kay Gary Waller
BEN JONSON EDMUND SPENSER
Mary Lago Linda Wagner-Martin
E. M. FORSTER SYLVIA PLATH
Clinton Machann Cedric Watts
MATTHEW ARNOLD JOSEPH CONRAD
Alasdair D. F. Macrae John Williams
W.B. YEATS WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Joseph McMinn Tom Winnifrith and Edward Chitham
JONATHAN SWIFT CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE
Kerry McSweeney John Worthen
GEORGE ELIOT D. H. LAWRENCE
John Mepham David Wykes
VIRGINIA WOOLF EVELYN WAUGH
Michael O'Neill
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Literary Lives
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Sylvia Plath
A Literary Life
Linda Wagner-Martin
Hanes Professor of English
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill
© Linda Wagner-Martin 1999
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Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 1999 by
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For Andrea
Contents
Chronology of Plath's Literary Life
Vlll
Preface xi
Note to Reader xii
Part One
1 The Writing Life 3
2 Creating Lives 11
3 Creating the Persona of the Self 21
4 Recalling the Bell Jar 33
5 Lifting the Bell Jar 42
6 Plath's Hospital Writing 54
7 Defining Health 67
Part Two
8 The Journey Toward Ariel 83
9 Plath's Poems about Women 95
10 Plath's Triumphant Woman Poems 106
11 Getting Rid of Daddy 119
12 Sylvia Plath, The Poet and Her Writing Life 133
Notes 146
Bibliography (selected), Primary and Secondary 161
Index 167
vii
Chronology of Plath's
Literary Life
1932 Sylvia Plath born October 27 in Jamaica Plain, a part of
Boston, Massachusetts, to Aurelia Schober and Otto Plath.
Family living in Winthrop, Massachusetts.
1936 The Plath family, including son Warren, who was born
in the spring of 1935, moves to 892 Johnson Avenue
in Winthrop Center, near the grandparents' Schober
home.
1938 Hurricane of 21 September (described in Plath's poems).
1940 Otto Plath dies of an embolism following surgery (com
plications from undiagnosed diabetes caused amputation
of leg). Sylvia and Warren do not attend funeral.
1942 The Plath family, now including the Schobers, moves to
23 Elmwood Road in Wellesley ("inland") and Aurelia
takes a teaching post at Boston University. Sylvia moves
back a grade at Marshall Livingston Perrin Grammar
School.
1944 Sylvia enrolls at Alice L. Phillips Junior High School;
writes for The Phillipian, the school's literary magazine.
1947 Sylvia enters Gamaliel Bradford Senior High School in
Wellesley; during her senior year, she co-edits The Brad
ford.
1950-51 Scholarship student at Smith College, Northampton, Mas
sachusetts, as an English major; lives at Haven house.
Dates, among others, Dick Norton (the model for Buddy
Willard of The Bell Jar).
1951 Works as a mother's helper in Swampscott, Massachu
setts, during summer.
1952 After sophomore year at Smith, works during the summer
at the Belmont Hotel in West Harwich, in Wellesley, and
in Chatham, Massachusetts. Lives in Lawrence house
beginning with her junior year at Smith.
1953 Mademoiselle College Board experience in New York dur
ing June. Returns to Wellesley for the remainder of the
summer and becomes depressed. Receives bipolar electro
convulsive shock treatments and on August 24 attempts
viii
Chronology ix
suicide. Recovery at McLean Hospital, Belmont, Massa
chusetts.
1954 Returns to Smith for spring semester. Plans honors thesis
on Dostoyevski's use of the double. Attends Harvard
summer school.
1955 Graduates summa cum laude from Smith in June; in the fall,
attends Newnham College, Cambridge, England, on a
Fulbright.
1956 Meets Ted Hughes February 25 and marries him secretly
June 16, with her mother in attendance. Grandmother
Schober dies in May. Honeymoon in Benidorm (Spain)
and Heptonstall, West Yorkshire. In December Plath and
Hughes rent a flat at 55 Eltisley Avenue, Cambridge.
Studies with Dorothea Krook.
1957 June, Plath takes her degree and moves with Hughes to
America. They summer on Cape Cod and then move to
Northampton where Plath teaches freshman English at
Smith for the year; Ted teaches part-time at The Univer
sity of Massachusetts, Amherst.
1958 Moving to Boston in order to write, Sylvia takes part
time jobs and resumes therapy with Ruth Buescher.
She attends Robert Lowell's poetry seminar where
she becomes friends with Anne Sexton and George Star
buck.
1959 After the summer spent traveling through the US, Sylvia
and Ted are residents at Yaddo, the writers' colony in
Saratoga Springs, New York, until they sail for England
in December. Plath never returns to the United States.
1960 After holidays in West Yorkshire, they rent a flat at
3 Chalcot Square, London. Their first child, Frieda
Rebecca Hughes, is born there April 1. The Colossus is
published in England in October.
1961 February 6, Plath has a miscarriage; February 28, an
appendectomy. In late July, she and Hughes buy the
manor house, Court Green, in North Tawton, Devon.
1962 Nicholas Farrar Hughes born January 17; Plath writes
'Three Women." Marital difficulties intensify in the
spring and by October Hughes has moved into London.
Plath writes her late ("October") poems, the main part of
Ariel. In mid-December, she and the children move to
23 Fitzroy Road ("Yeats' house") in London.
x Chronology
1963 The Bell Jar is published under the pseudonym Victoria
Lucas. Plath dies of suicide February II.
1965 Hughes publishes his version of her collection Ariel, and
the cult of Plath begins.
1966 The Bell Jar is published in England under Plath's name.
1971 Hughes publishes Crossing the Water and Winter Trees,
additional collections drawn from Plath's later unpub
lished poetry.
1977 Hughes publishes Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and
Other Prose Writing, Plath's stories and essays, with some
journal excerpts.
1981 Hughes publishes Sylvia Plath: The Collected Poems, the
largest collection to date (though still not complete).
1982 Collected Poems wins the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, an
award seldom given posthumously. The Journals of Sylvia
Plath, 1950-1962 is published only in the United States,
with Hughes's admission in the Introduction that he had
destroyed Plath's last journal, and that her journal dating
from late 1959 to the last had been lost.
