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Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet and novelist. Born in Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956 and they lived together first in the United States and then England, having two children together – Frieda and Nicholas. Following a long struggle with depression and a marital separation, Plath committed suicide in 1963. Controversy continues to surround the events of her life and death, as well as her writing and legacy.

Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two collections The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel. In 1982, she became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously for The Collected Poems. She was also the author of one semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, which was published shortly before her death.

Biography

Childhood

Plath was born during the Great Depression on October 27, 1932 in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, to Aurelia Schober Plath, a first-generation American of Austrian descent, and Otto Emile Plath, an immigrant from Grabow, Germany. Plath's father was a professor of biology and German at Boston University and author of a book about bumblebees. Plath's mother was approximately twenty-one years younger than her husband. They met while she was earning her master's degree in teaching and took one of his courses. Otto had become alienated from his family because he chose not to become a Lutheran minister, as his grandparents had intended to be.

In April 1935, Plath's brother Warren was born. The family moved to Winthrop, Massachusetts in 1936 and Plath spent much of her childhood on Johnson Avenue. Raised a Unitarian Christian, Plath experienced a loss of faith after her father's death, and remained ambivalent about religion throughout her life Plath's mother, Aurelia, had grown up in Winthrop, and her maternal grandparents, the Schobers, had lived in a section of the town called Point Shirley, a location mentioned in Plath's poetry. While living in Winthrop, eight-year-old Plath published her first poem in the Boston Herald's children's section. In addition to writing, she showed early promise as an artist, winning an award for her paintings from The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in 1947.

Otto Plath died on November 5, 1940, a week and a half after Plath's eighth birthday, of complications following the amputation of a foot due to untreated diabetes. He had become ill shortly after a close friend died of lung cancer. Comparing the similarities between his friend's symptoms and his own, Otto became convinced that he, too, was ill with lung cancer and did not seek treatment until his diabetes had progressed too far. Otto Plath was buried in Winthrop Cemetery; visiting her father's grave prompted Plath to write the poem Electra on Azalea Path. After her husband's death, Aurelia Plath moved her children and her parents to 26 Elmwood Road, Wellesley, Massachusetts in 1942.

College years

In 1950, Plath attended Smith College. She dated Yale senior Dick Norton during her junior year. Norton, upon whom the character of Buddy in The Bell Jar is based, contracted tuberculosis and was treated at the Ray Brook Sanatorium near Saranac Lake. While visiting Norton, Plath broke her leg skiing, an incident that was fictionalized in the novel. During the summer after her third year of college, Plath was awarded a coveted position as guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine, during which she spent a month in New York City. The experience was not what she had hoped it would be, beginning within her a seemingly downward spiral in her outlook on herself and life in general. Many of the events that took place during that summer were later used as inspiration for her novel The Bell Jar. Following this experience, Plath made her first medically documented suicide attempt by crawling under her house and taking an overdose of sleeping pills. After her suicide attempt, Plath was briefly committed to a mental institution where she received electroconvulsive therapy. Both her stay at McLean Hospital and her Smith scholarship was paid for by Olive Higgins Prouty, who had successfully recovered from a mental breakdown herself. Plath seemed to make an good recovery and graduated from Smith with honors in June 1955.

She obtained a Fulbright scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge where she continued actively writing poetry and publishing her work in the student newspaper Varsity. At Newnham, she studied with Dorothea Krook, whom she held in high regard. She met the English poet Ted Hughes at a party given in Cambridge. After a brief courtship, they were married on June 16, 1956 at St George the Martyr Holborn in the London Borough of Camden.

Personal life and poetry

From July 1957 to December 1959, Plath and Hughes lived and worked in the United States, where Plath taught at Smith College. The couple then moved to Boston where Plath audited seminars by Robert Lowell that were also attended by Anne Sexton. At this time Plath and Hughes first met W. S. Merwin, who admired their work and was to remain a lifelong friend.

Upon learning that Plath was pregnant, the couple moved back to the United Kingdom. Plath and Hughes lived in London for a while at 3 Chalcot Square, near the Primrose Hill area of Regent's Park, and then settled in the small market town of North Tawton in Devon. In 1960, while in London, Plath published her first collection of poetry, The Colossus. In February 1961, she suffered a miscarriage; a number of her poems address this event.

Plath's marriage to Hughes was fraught with difficulties, particularly surrounding his affair with Assia Wevill, and the couple separated in 1962. Plath experienced an extraordinary burst of creativity that autumn and wrote most of the poems on which her reputation now rests. She returned to London with their children, Frieda and Nicholas, and rented a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road (only a few streets from the Chalcot Square flat) in a house where W. B. Yeats once lived. Plath was pleased by this fact and considered it a good omen. The winter of 1962 was one of the coldest in 100 years; the pipes froze, the children – now two years old and nine months – were often sick, and the house had no telephone. Her depression returned. In a BBC interview in March 2000, Al Alvarez – poet, editor and literary champion of Hughes and Plath – spoke about his failure to recognize Plath's misery. Alvarez admitted his inability to offer emotional support to Plath and says he was blinded by her poetry itself. "I failed her on that level. I was 30 years old and stupid. What did I know about chronic clinical depression? She kind of needed someone to take care of her. And that was not something I could do." In his 1971 book on suicide, he claimed that Plath's suicide was an unanswered cry for help.

That winter Plath finished her second and last collection, Ariel, which wouldn't be published until after her death in 1965. Plath's only novel The Bell Jar came out in January 1963, published under the pen name "Victoria Lucas".

Death

Dr Horder, a close friend who lived near Plath, says he prescribed Plath antidepressants a few days before her death. Knowing she was at risk alone with two young children, he visited her daily and made strenuous efforts to have her admitted to a hospital. When that failed, he arranged for a live-in nurse. Some commentators have argued that because anti-depressants may take up to a three weeks to take effect, her prescription from Horder would not necessarily have helped. Others say that Plath's American doctor had warned her never again to take the anti-depressant drug which she found worsened her depression but Dr Horder had prescribed it under a proprietary name which she did not recognize.

And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

An inquiry on the day following Plath's death gave a ruling of suicide. Hughes was devastated; they had been separated only five months. In a letter to an old friend of Plath's from Smith College, he wrote, "That's the end of my life. The rest is posthumous". Plath's gravestone in Heptonstall churchyard bears the inscription that Hughes chose for her: "Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted." Biographers variously attribute the source of the quote to the 16th century Buddhist novel Journey to the West written by Wu Ch'eng-En or to the Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita.

The gravestone has been repeatedly vandalized by those aggrieved that "Hughes" is written on the stone; they have attempted to chisel it off, leaving only the name "Sylvia Plath". When Hughes' partner Assia Wevill killed herself and her four year old daughter Shura in 1969, this practice intensified. After each defacement, Hughes had the damaged stone removed, sometimes leaving the site unmarked during repair. Outraged mourners accused Hughes in the media of dishonoring her name by removing the stone. Wevill's death led to claims that Hughes had been abusive to both partners, Plath and Wevill. In 1970, radical feminist poet Robin Morgan published the poem "Arraignment", in which she openly accused Hughes of the battery and murder of Plath; other feminists threatened to kill him in Plath's name.

In 1989, with Hughes under public attack, a battle raged in the letters pages of The Guardian and The Independent. In The Guardian on April 20, 1989 Hughes wrote the article "The Place Where Sylvia Plath Should Rest in Peace":

In the years soon after death, when scholars approached me, I tried to take their apparently serious concern for the truth about Sylvia Plath seriously. But I learned my lesson early. If I tried too hard to tell them exactly how something happened, in the hope of correcting some fantasy, I was quite likely to be accused of trying to suppress Free Speech. In general, my refusal to have anything to do with the Plath Fantasia has been regarded as an attempt to suppress Free Speech The Fantasia about Sylvia Plath is more needed than the facts. Where that leaves respect for the truth of her life (and of mine), or for her memory, or for the literary tradition, I do not know.

On March 6, 2009, Nicholas Hughes, the son of Plath and Hughes, hung himself at his home in Alaska, following a history of depression.

Works

Journals

Plath began keeping a diary at age 11, doing so until her suicide. Her adult diaries, starting from her freshman year at Smith College in 1950, were first published in 1980 as The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Frances McCullough. In 1982, when Smith College acquired Plath's remaining journals, Hughes sealed two of them until February 11, 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of Plath's death.

During the last years of his life, Hughes began working on a fuller publication of Plath's journals. In 1998, shortly before his death, he unsealed the two journals, and passed the project onto his children by Plath, Frieda and Nicholas, who passed it on to Karen V. Kukil. Kukil finished her editing in December 1999, and in 2000 Anchor Books published The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. According to the back cover, roughly two-thirds of the Unabridged Journals is newly released material. The American author Joyce Carol Oates hailed the publication as a "genuine literary event".

Hughes faced criticism for his role in handling the journals: he claims to have destroyed Plath's last journal, which contained entries from the winter of 1962 up to her death. In the foreword of the 1982 version, he writes, "I destroyed because I did not want her children to have to read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival)."

Poetry

And here you come, with a cup of tea
Wreathed in steam.
The blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it.
You hand me two children, two roses.

Plath wrote poetry from the age of eight. At Smith College she majored in English and won all the major prizes in writing and scholarship. She edited the college magazine Mademoiselle and on her graduation in 1955, she won the Glascock Prize for Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea. Later at Newnham, Cambridge wrote for the Varsity magazine. By the time Heinmann published her first collection, Collosus and other poems in the UK in late in 1960, Plath had been short-listed several times in the Yale Younger Poets book competition and had had work printed in Harpers, The Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement. All the poems in Collusus had already been printed in major US and British journals and she had a contract with The New Yorker.

Colossus received largely positive UK reviews, highlighting her voice as new and strong, individual and American in tone. Peter Dickinson at Punch called the collection "a real find" and "exhilarating to read", full of "clean, easy verse". Bernard Bergonzi at the Manchester Guardian said the book was an "outstanding technical accomplishment" with a "virtuoso' quality". From the point of publication she became a presence on the poetry scene. The book went on to be published America in 1962 to less glowing reviews. Whilst her craft was generally praised her writing was viewed as more derivative of other poets. Some later critics have described the first book as somewhat young, staid or conventional in comparison to the more free-flowing imagery and intensity of her later work.

The poems in Ariel mark a departure from her earlier work into a more personal arena of poetry. It is a possibility Robert Lowell's poetry played a part in this shift as she cited Lowell's poem Life Studies as a significant influence, in an interview before her just death. Posthumously published in 1966, The impact of Ariel was dramatic, with its dark and potentially autobiographical descriptions of mental illness in poems such as Tulips, Daddy and Lady Lazarus. Time and Life both reviewed the slim volume in the wake of her death.

Time said

Within a week of her death, intellectual London was hunched over copies of a strange and terrible poem she had written during her last sick slide toward suicide. Daddy was its title; its subject was her morbid love-hatred of her father; its style was as brutal as a truncheon. What is more, Daddy was merely the first jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bale across the literary landscape. Death like a Poem. In her most ferocious poems, Daddy and Lady Lazarus, fear, hate, love, death and the poet's own identity become fused at black heat with the figure of her father, and through him, with the guilt of the German exterminators and the suffering of their Jewish victims. They are poems, as Robert Lowell says in his preface to Ariel, that "play Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder."

Some in the feminist movement saw Plath as speaking for their experience – as a "symbol of blighted female genius". Writer Honor Moore describes Ariel as marking the beginning of a movement – Plath suddenly visible as "a woman on paper" – certain and audacious. Moore says

When Sylvia Plath’s Ariel was published in the United States in 1966, American women noticed. Not only women who ordinarily read poems, but housewives and mothers whose ambitions had awakened Here was a woman, superbly trained in her craft, whose final poems uncompromisingly charted female rage, ambivalence, and grief, in a voice with which many women identified.

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Plath's work is often held within the genre of Confessional poetry and the style of her work compared to other confessional contemporaries, such as Lowell, Sexton and Snodgrass. Since 2000, increasing numbers of scholars have proposed a revised, less biographical perspective on Plath's work that would expand standard critical interpretations. Such volumes as Tracy Brain's work The Other Sylvia Plath (2001) and The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath (2007) argue for the wider context of twentieth century politics and culture to be given due weight in interpretation.

In 2006, a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University discovered a previously unpublished sonnet written by Plath entitled Ennui. The poem, composed during Plath's early years at Smith College, is published in Blackbird, the online journal.

Hughes controversy

As Hughes and Plath were legally married on her death, Hughes inherited the Plath estate, including all her written work. Hughes has been condemned from some quarters for burning Plath's last journal, saying he "did not want her children to have to read it". He "lost" another journal and an unfinished novel and instructed that a collection of Plath's papers and journals should not be released until 2013. In the reams of literary criticism and biography published after their deaths, after the release of new material, biopics, or any old-new controversy, the debate over Plath's literary estate very often comes down to which side the readers pick. Hughes has been accused of attempting to control the estate for his own ends, although royalties from Plath's poetry were placed into a trust account for their two children, Frieda and Nicholas.

Frieda Hughes, now a poet, was angered by the making of the 2003 BBC biopic Ted and Sylvia. Hughes, who was two years old when her mother died, accused the "peanut crunching" public of wanting to be entertained by her mother's death. In 2003, she published her poem My Mother in Tatler. It reads

Now they want to make a film
For anyone lacking the ability
To imagine the body, head in oven,
Orphaning children
 
they think
I should give them my mother's words
To fill the mouth of their monster,
Their Sylvia Suicide Doll

From My Mother, in The Book of Mirrors (2003) by Frieda Hughes

Bibliography

Poetry collections

• The Colossus and Other Poems (1960)
• Ariel (1961–1965), includes the poems "Tulips", "Daddy", "Ariel", "Lady Lazarus" and "The Munich Mannequins"
• Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices (1968)
• Crossing the Water (1971)
• Winter Trees (1971)
• The Collected Poems (1981)
• Selected Poems (1985)
• Plath: Poems (1998)

Collected Prose and novels

• The Bell Jar: A novel (1963), under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas"
• Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 (1975)
• Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts (1977)
• The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)
• The Magic Mirror (published 1989), Plath's Smith College senior thesis
• The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil (2000)

Audio poetry readings

• Sylvia Plath Reads, Harper Audio (2000)

Children's books

• The Bed Book (1976)
• The It-Doesn't-Matter-Suit (1996)
• Collected Children's Stories (UK, 2001)
• Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen (2001)

See also

• Confessional poetry
• Ariel
• Sylvia Plath effect

References

1. Introduction to Twilight at the Equator: A Novel by Jaime Manrique. University of Wisconsin Press, 2003 ISBN 0299187748
2. Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1970), pp. 57–74
3. Zusak interview for The Book Depository accessed 2010-02-21
4. ^ Becker, Jillian. (2003). Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0312315988
5. ^ Steven Axelrod. "Sylvia Plath". The Literary Encyclopedia, 17 Sept. 2003, The Literary Dictionary Company (April 24, 2007), University of California Riverside. Retrieved 2007-06-01.
6. Kirk, Connie Ann. (2004). Sylvia Plath: A Biography. Greenwood Press, p. xvi. ISBN 0313332142
7. ^ Sylvia Plath NeuroticPoets.com Cite error: The named reference "NeuroticPoets" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
8. Plath Helle, Anita. (2007). The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath. University of Michigan Press. p.41-44. ISBN 0472069276
9. Kirk, p.23
10. Kirk, p.32
11. Taylor, Robert. (1986). America's Magic Mountain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-37905-9
12. "Dictionary of Literary Biography, 2nd" (Document). A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book, University of Georgia. The Gale Group. pp. 259–64. {{cite document}}: Unknown parameter |editor-first= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |editor-surname= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |publication-date= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |volume= ignored (help)
13. Helle, Anita (Ed). (2007). The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. p.44
14. "Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)". pseudonym Victoria Lucas, Books and Writers, www.kirjasto.sci.fi (2000). Retrieved 2007-06-25.
15. "Sylvia Plath". UIUC Library Online, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Retrieved 2007-06-25.
16. Marie Griffin. "Sylvia Plath — Poet". "Great talent in great darkness", Bipolar Disorder (2007 About, Inc.). Retrieved 2007-06-25.
17. Poetry Archive: Plath Biog
18. Richard Whittington-Egan. "Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath—a marriage examined". Contemporary Review (February 2005). Retrieved 2007-06-25.
19. Brenda C. Mondragon. "Sylvia Plath". Neurotic Poets (1997–2006). Retrieved 2007-06-25.
20. ^ Gifford, Terry. (2008). Ted Hughes. Routledge. ISBN 0415311896
21. ^ Vanessa Thorpe (March 19, 2000). "I failed her. I was 30 and stupid". The Observer, Guardian Unlimited (March 19, 2000). London. Retrieved 2007-02-27.
22. ^ "Rhyme, reason and depression". (February 16, 1993). The Guardian. Retrieved June 29, 2010.
23. Kirk, p. xx
24. "Hughes letter reveals his Plath reconciliation hope". The Guardian. 18 August 2001.
25. Guardian article Ariel 13 March 2008
26. Various biographies describe the woman who discovered the body as a nurse or an au pair. No name is given. Gifford; Kirk.
27. Stevenson, Anne (1998). "Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath" (Document). Mariner Books.
28. Peter K. Steinberg. "Biography (1956–1963)". A celebration, This is; www.sylviaplath.info. Retrieved 2007-02-28.
29. Kirk, p. 103
30. Smith College. "Plath papers. Series 6, Hughes. Plath archive.
31. ^ Kirk, p.104
32. Carmody, Denise Lardner and John Tully Carmody. (1996). Mysticism: Holiness East. Oxford University Press
33. Cheng'en Wu, translated and abridged by Arthur Waley (1942) Monkey: Folk Novel of China. UNESCO collection, Chinese series. Grove Press
34. ^ Badia, Janet and Jennifer Phegle. (2005). Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present. University of Toronto Press. p.252. ISBN 0802089283.
35. Robin Morgan's Official website
36. Hughes, Ted. "The Place Where Sylvia Plath Should Rest in Peace". The Guardian. April 20, 1989.
37. "Son of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes kills himself". (March 23, 2009). The Guardian. Retrieved June 29, 2010.
38. "Poet Plath's son takes own life". (March 23, 2009). BBC. Retrieved June 29, 2010.
39. ^ Wagner-Martin, Linda (1997) Sylvia Plath: the critical heritage Routledge ISBN 0415159423
40. ^ Wagner-Martin, Linda (1988) Sylvia Plath, the critical heritage routledge p2-5
41. Time magazine article. The Blood Jet Is Poetry. Friday, Jun. 10, 1966
42. Plath has been criticized for her numerous and controversial allusions to the Holocaust. See Al Strangeways. "The Boot in the Face: The Problem of the Holocaust in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath". Contemporary Literature. Retrieved 2009-06-23.
43. Boston Review. Article by Honor Moore. March/April 2009. After Ariel: Celebrating the poetry of the women’s movement
44. Jeanette Winterson Website: Plath's Morning Song
45. ^ Brain, Tracy. (2005) Dangerous Confessions: The Problem of Reading Sylvia Plath Biographically." from Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays Ed. Jo Gill. Routledge
46. Monaco, Dan: "When You're In Trouble, Go Into Your Dance: History Culture and Sylvia Plath.": The Straddler SpringSummer2010 Accessed 2 Jun 2010
47. Brain, Tracy. The Other Sylvia Plath. Essex: Longman, 2001
48. Brain, Tracy. "Dangerous Confessions: The Problem of Reading Sylvia Plath Biographically." Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays. Ed. Jo Gill.
49. The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2007. Ed. Anita Helle.
50. However, two poems entitled Ennui (I) and Ennui (II) are listed in a partial catalogue of Plath's "juvenilia" in the "Collected Poems". A note explains that "he texts of all but half a dozen" of the many pieces listed "are in the Sylvia Plath Archive of juvenilia in the Lilly Library at Indiana University. The rest are with the Sylvia Plath Estate."
51. ^ Christodoulides, Nephie (2005) Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking: Motherhood in Sylvia Plath's Work. Rodopi Ltd. pix ISBN 9042017724
52. Guardian article 20 October 2003: Desperately seeking Sylvia
53. David Smith (September 10, 2006). "Ted Hughes, the domestic tyrant". The Observer. London. Retrieved 2007-06-25.
54. Gill, Jo (2006) The Cambridge companion to Sylvia Plath Cambridge University Press p9-10 ISBN 0521844967
55. Hughes, Frieda ed. (2004) Ariel: The Restored Edition, Faber and Faber p. xvii
56. Bloodaxe Publishers: Poem of the month: My Mother by Freida Hughes
57. BBC article 3 February, 2003. Plath film angers daughter

Biographies

• Sylvia Plath (2004, Chelsea House, Great Writers Series) by Peter K. Steinberg, ISBN 0-7910-7843-4
• Sylvia Plath: Method & Madness (A Biography) (2004, Schaffner Press, 2Rev Ed) by Edward Butscher, ISBN 0-9710-5982-9
• Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (2003, Palgrave Macmillan, 2Rev Ed) by Linda Wagner-Martin, ISBN 1-4039-1653-5
• Her Husband: Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath, a Marriage (2003, Viking Adult) by Diane Middlebrook, ISBN 0-670-03187-9
• Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath (1991, Da Capo Press) by Paul Alexander, ISBN 0-3068-1299-1
• The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (1991, Carol Publishing) by Ronald Hayman, ISBN 1-5597-2068-9
• Bitter Fame. A Life of Sylvia Plath (1989, Houghton Mifflin) by Anne Stevenson, ISBN 0-395-45374-7

Other works on Plath

• The 2003 motion picture Sylvia, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, tells the story of Plath's troubled relationship with Hughes.
• Ariel's Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and the Story of Birthday Letters (2002, W.W. Norton) by Erica Wagner | ISBN 0-3933-2301-3
• Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath by Jillian Becker (friend with whom Plath spent her last weekend) (St Martins Press, New York, 2002).
• Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words (1992, Johns Hopkins University) by Steven Gould Axelrod | ISBN 0-8018-4374-X
• The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1995, Vintage) by Janet Malcolm | ISBN 0-6797-5140-8
• A psychobiographical chapter on Plath's loss of her father, and the effect of that loss on her personality and her art, is contained in William Todd Schultz's Handbook of Psychobiography (Oxford University Press, 2005).

Fictional offerings

• Sylvia Plath: A Dramatic Portrait Conceived and Adapted from Her Writings (1976, Faber and Faber) by Barry Kyle. ISBN 978-0571106981.
• "Sylvia Plath" – A song written by Ryan Adams and Richard Causon on the album Gold (2001, Lost Highway)
• Sylvia Plath Must Not Die – A performance piece by the troupe One Yellow Rabbit, staged at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts in December 2008
• Escape from Hell – by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (Tor, 2009), prominently features Plath in Hell after her death, in Dante's Wood of the Suicides
• "Your Own, Sylvia: a verse portrait of Sylvia Plath" by Stephanie Hemphill (2007). ISBN 037583799X.

External links

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• Sylvia Plath at Blackbird
• SylviaPlath.info
• Sylvia Plath at Find a Grave
• Spotlight on Sylvia Plath, Voices and Visions series
• Template:Worldcat id
• Sylvia Plath's personal library on LibraryThing
• Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath collection at University of Victoria, Special Collections

Essays

• JCO on Sylvia Plath – Essays on Plath by Joyce Carol Oates
• Critical essays on Plath's works
• Online Essays and Papers
• Online Essay at Scribd

Plath's poems

• Poetry of Sylvia Plath

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