When Sylvia Plath died in London in February 1963, newspapers needed only a handful of lines to report the death of a woman who, within a few years, would become one of the most recognisable poetic voices of the twentieth century. In one of those reports, she was not even primarily Sylvia Plath. She was the “wife of Ted Hughes,” one of Britain’s best-known young poets. Another newspaper in her hometown incorrectly reported that she had died of pneumonia.
The irony is almost perfect. A woman who spent much of her life trying to escape the roles other people assigned to her began her posthumous life as a footnote to her husband’s name.
It took only a few years for those roles to reverse.
Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston. Her father, Otto Plath, was a German immigrant, an entomologist and a professor at Boston University. Her mother, Aurelia, was of Austrian descent and had once been his student. Sylvia showed an extraordinary relationship with language from a very young age and published her first poem when she was eight.
A few months later, she lost her father.
His death became one of the great underground currents running through both her life and her poetry. His absence changed shape over the years, becoming anger, abandonment, authority, worship and eventually an almost mythological adversary. From the carefully controlled poetry of The Colossus to the eruption of Daddy, her father never entirely left the room.
Plath grew up as what we might now call an overachieving child. Brilliant at school, ambitious, disciplined, winning prizes and publishing her work, she seemed to possess every quality expected of the young woman who might conquer postwar America.
In 1953, while studying at Smith College, she won a guest editorship at Mademoiselle magazine and spent a summer in New York. The experience, with its combination of glamour, competition and suffocating expectations about how a young woman ought to live, would later become the foundation of her only novel, The Bell Jar.
That same summer, her mental health collapsed. Electroconvulsive therapy followed, then a serious suicide attempt involving medication, and months of psychiatric treatment. What matters, however, is that her life did not end there, and her story should not be read backwards as though every event inevitably pointed toward 1963.
Plath returned to Smith, completed her studies with exceptional results and won a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge. She had not abandoned her ambitions. If anything, she continued to demand nearly everything from herself.
At Cambridge, she met Ted Hughes in 1956. Their first meeting became legendary partly because Plath herself recorded it in her journals with the characteristic excess and physical intensity of her writing. She described a large, dark man, an almost aggressive kiss, earrings disappearing, and a bite on the cheek.
Their relationship was intense from the beginning. They married that same year and, for a time, seemed almost like the ideal literary couple: two poets reading each other, working, travelling, writing and attempting to build a shared life.
Plath’s journals, however, reveal something far more interesting than the simple image of a feminist woman being oppressed by a man. Within a few pages she could worry that her own identity might disappear inside Hughes, then write about how much she wanted to cook, create a home and support the creative force of the man she loved.
That contradiction is essential to understanding Plath. She was not a woman who had already resolved the conflicts that second-wave feminism would later articulate. She was living inside them.
She wanted to write great literature and have a family. She wanted independence and union. She wanted to be a mother without disappearing as a writer. She wanted to love without becoming a satellite.
Their daughter Frieda was born in 1960, the same year Plath published her first poetry collection, The Colossus. Their son Nicholas followed in 1962.
A few months later, the family began to break apart.
Plath discovered Hughes’s relationship with Assia Wevill, and the couple separated in September 1962. They never divorced, but their marriage was effectively over.
Strangely, the collapse of that life coincided with the most explosive creative period of her own.
Today, The Bell Jar is one of the best-known twentieth-century novels about female experience and mental illness. Shortly before Plath died, however, American publishers were far from convinced that they had anything important on their hands.
On December 28, 1962, roughly six weeks before her death, Alfred A. Knopf rejected the book.
Editor Judith Jones, the woman who had helped rescue Anne Frank’s diary from obscurity and who would later become associated with Julia Child, believed the first half of the novel worked. The young woman in New York, the expectations placed on her, the magazine world and her uncertainty about adulthood were, in Jones’s view, lively and convincing.
Then Esther Greenwood began to collapse.
That was where the publishers became uncomfortable.
Jones essentially wrote that she had not been prepared, as a reader, for the scale of the character’s illness and suicide attempt. Harper & Row made a similar judgement: once Esther breaks down, they felt, the book stops functioning as a novel and becomes something closer to an ordinary account of illness.
It is the kind of publishing judgement that acquires an almost comic quality when viewed more than sixty years later.
Because the exact point at which those publishers thought the book lost its power would later become the point where millions of readers felt it gained it.
The Bell Jar had already appeared in Britain under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in January 1963, one month before Plath’s death. It would not be published in the United States until 1971.
By then, everything had changed.
After separating from Hughes, Plath entered a period of extraordinary creative intensity. She woke very early, often before the children, and wrote with an almost feverish speed.
During those months came poems such as Lady Lazarus and Daddy, along with much of the material that would later form Ariel.
The change from her first collection was striking. The technical discipline remained, but now the language carried anger, humour, violence, sexuality and an unprecedented sense of personal exposure.
This was the Plath that women of the second feminist wave would discover a few years later.
Not because she had written a political manifesto.
But because she had put into poetry things that had often been considered too private, too disturbing or too “female” to occupy the centre of serious literature.
By early 1963, Plath was living with Frieda and Nicholas in London, in a flat on Fitzroy Road where W. B. Yeats had once lived.
The winter was exceptionally severe. Plath was experiencing profound depression, taking sleeping medication, and her doctor had been trying to arrange psychiatric help. Contemporary reports later stated that correspondence connected with a psychiatric appointment had gone to the wrong address.
On the morning of February 11, 1963, a nurse entered the flat.
She found Sylvia Plath dead in the kitchen.
She had died from carbon monoxide poisoning from the gas oven. Before her death, she had taken measures intended to prevent the gas from reaching the two young children sleeping elsewhere in the home and had left milk and bread for them to find when they woke.
She was thirty years old.
The detail about the children’s food has often been used almost as literary symbolism in retellings of her death. Perhaps it is better to resist the temptation to turn it into one. There was nothing romantic about that morning.
There was a severely ill woman, two small children, and a death.
Nothing more is required to make it tragic.
The press reaction was remarkably small.
Because the death was a suicide, Plath’s family did not seek publicity. Brief notices appeared in Boston newspapers, some so short that they disappeared among ordinary death announcements.
There was another irony.
In some listings, anyone searching for Sylvia Plath had to look under the letter “H,” because she appeared as Sylvia Plath Hughes.
The local St Pancras Chronicle gave a more accurate account of the circumstances, but even there the framing effectively introduced Plath through a famous man: she was the wife of Ted Hughes.
Her death did not immediately become an international literary event.
The mythology took time to build.
Only six days later, however, her friend and critic Al Alvarez wrote in The Observer that her final poems would establish her as one of the most important poetic voices of her generation.
This prediction was right.
Ariel was published in 1965, two years after her death, and almost immediately changed the way Plath was seen.
The woman who had appeared in early obituaries as “Ted Hughes’s wife” was now becoming a writer other poets had to reckon with.
In the following decade, The Bell Jar developed an even larger life of its own. When it was published in the United States in 1971, it spent months on bestseller lists and gradually became a book handed from one generation to the next, particularly among young women.
Gloria Steinem also helped bring Plath’s radio work Three Women back into view by publishing it in an early issue connected with what would become Ms. magazine.
That was when another transformation began.
The poet became a feminist symbol.
By the 1970s, the Plath-Hughes relationship had acquired a political life of its own.
Women reading Plath through the language of women’s liberation saw Hughes as the man who had betrayed, abandoned and ultimately destroyed a major female artist. Some gathered outside his home or near Plath’s grave in Heptonstall, chanting slogans and even calling him a murderer.
That anger did not come from nowhere. Hughes’s relationship with Assia Wevill was real, and the collapse of the marriage was deeply damaging to Plath.
But the story does not fit comfortably around a single culprit.
Plath had already experienced severe depression, psychiatric treatment and a suicide attempt years before meeting Hughes. Later readers and scholars have proposed different possible diagnoses, but none can responsibly be assigned to her with certainty decades later.
Turning Hughes into the sole cause of her death was perhaps as reductive as the earlier attempt to reduce Plath herself to the role of “tragic poet.”
Plath’s death did not remain confined to literature. It became part of her family’s history in ways her children and relatives could not control.
One of her nieces later described the strange experience of hearing her aunt’s name turn up unexpectedly in popular culture, even in television shows such as The Simpsons, and realising again and again that, for the rest of the world, Sylvia Plath was not simply a relative but a cultural symbol.
Then, in 2009, another tragedy followed.
Nicholas Hughes, the son who had been only a baby when his mother died, had become a fisheries biologist and was living in Alaska. At the age of 47, he died by suicide.
His death became international news largely because he was Sylvia Plath’s son.
It was perhaps the harshest reminder of how difficult it can be for a family to escape a mythology that the outside world has decided to place upon it.
In 1982, Sylvia Plath was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for her collected poems. By then she had already become something far larger than the woman briefly mentioned in those small 1963 obituaries.
With fame, however, came the problem Woody Allen had already touched on, however ironically, in Annie Hall: the tendency to romanticise her suicide.
For some, Plath became the woman who was “too sensitive” or “too brilliant” for the world. For others, she became exclusively a victim of patriarchy. For still others, she became proof of the dangerous idea that great art requires self-destruction.
All of those versions make her smaller.
Sylvia Plath does not need the manner of her death to remain important.
What matters is already on the page: her perfectionism, her technique, her anger, her black humour, her intelligence, and her refusal to accept ready-made answers about what a woman, a mother, a wife or a writer was supposed to be.
When she died, the world needed only a few lines to say goodbye.
Then it spent decades refusing to stop talking about her.
Perhaps the simplest justice we can offer Sylvia Plath now is to remember that she did not become great because she died at thirty.
She was already great when she died.
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