The Journals of Sylvia Plath

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Guardian (Manchester, England), August 18, 2001, Christina Patterson, "Ted on Sylvia, for the Record," p. R3. The couple married on June 16, 1956, at St George the Martyr, Holborn in London (now in the Borough of Camden) with Plath's mother in attendance, and spent their honeymoon in Paris and Benidorm. Plath returned to Newnham in October to begin her second year. [5] During this time, they both became deeply interested in astrology and the supernatural, using ouija boards. [25] Wagner-Martin, Linda, Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage, Routledge & Kegan Paul (London, England), 1988. Malcolm, Janet (August 15, 1993). "The Mystery of Sylvia Plath". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on January 26, 2021 . Retrieved January 28, 2021. The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil (2017, Faber and Faber)

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) was an American author and poet. Plath is primarily known for her poetry, but earned her greatest reputation for her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, published pseudonymously weeks before her death. Plath's gravestone, in Heptonstall's parish churchyard of St Thomas the Apostle bears the inscription that Hughes chose for her: [50] "Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted." Biographers attribute the source of the quote to the Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita [50] or to the 16th-century Buddhist novel Journey to the West written by Wu Cheng'en. [51] [52] McCullough, Frances (2005) [1963]. Introduction. The Bell Jar. By Plath, Sylvia (1st Harper Perennial Classicsed.). New York: Perennial Classics. ISBN 0-06-093018-7. Got a queer and overpowering urge today to write, or typewrite, my whole novel on the pink, stiff, lovely textured Smith memorandum pads of 100 sheets each: a feat somehow, seeing a hunk of that pink paper, different from all the endless reams of white bond, my task seems finite, special, rose-cast.” – Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia PlathPerloff, Marjorie, Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 1990.

Born in 1932 in Boston, Plath was the daughter of a German immigrant college professor, Otto Plath, and one of his students, Aurelia Schober. The poet’s early years were spent near the seashore, but her life changed abruptly when her father died in 1940. Some of her most vivid poems, including the well-known “ Daddy,” concern her troubled relationship with her authoritarian father and her feelings of betrayal when he died. Financial circumstances forced the Plath family to move to Wellesley, Massachusetts, where Aurelia Plath taught advanced secretarial studies at Boston University. Sylvia Plath was a gifted student who had won numerous awards and had published stories and poetry in national magazines while still in her teens. She attended Smith College on scholarship and continued to excel, winning a Mademoiselle fiction contest one year and garnering a prestigious guest editorship of the magazine the following summer. Parker, James (June 2013). "Why Sylvia Plath haunts us". The Culture File. The Omnivore. The Atlantic. 311 (5): 34, 36 . Retrieved July 6, 2015. Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to. I've just got to put down what happened to me this afternoon. I can't tell mother; not yet, anyway. She was in my room when I came home, fussing with clothes, and she didn't even sense that something had happened. She just kept scolding and chattering on and on. So I couldn't stop her and tell her. No matter how it comes out, I have to write it.Olwyn Hughes, Corrections of Diane Middlebrook's Her Husband. Emory University Libraries: Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL), Olwyn Hughes Papers 1956–1997, box 2, folder 20 – cited in Ferretter 2009, p.15 Timothy Materer wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography,“The critical reactions to both The Bell Jar and Ariel were inevitably influenced by the manner of Plath’s death at 30.” Hardly known outside poetry circles during her lifetime, Plath became in death more than she might have imagined. Donoghue, for one, stated, “I can’t recall feeling, in 1963, that Plath’s death proved her life authentic or indeed that proof was required. ... But I recall that Ariel was received as if it were a bracelet of bright hair about the bone, a relic more than a book.” Feminists portrayed Plath as a woman driven to madness by a domineering father, an unfaithful husband, and the demands that motherhood made on her genius. Some critics lauded her as a confessional poet whose work “spoke the hectic, uncontrolled things our conscience needed, or thought it needed,” to quote Donoghue. Largely on the strength of Ariel, Plath became one of the best-known female American poets of the 20th century.