Plath to continue playing with the relationship between art and personal experience. While taking Lowell's class, Plath met fellow poet Anne Sexton. Sexton, who had begun writing poetry after having a nervous breakdown, was flamboyant and open—and she was an important up‐and‐coming poet. Plath and Sexton became friendly and would go out for drinks at the Ritz to talk about poetry and about their struggles with mental illness. As we will explore further in Chapter 3, Sexton became an influence on Plath's poetry.
During this time, Plath was trying to figure out how to move forward in her life as a poet and also become a mother. In 1960, Plath discovered she was pregnant, and she and Hughes decided to move back to England and rent a London apartment. A big year of both successes and setbacks lay ahead. On February 10, 1960, Plath signed a contract for her first book of poetry: The Colossus and Other Poems. A few months later, Plath's daughter Frieda was born. Plath became pregnant again later in the year but had a miscarriage followed by appendicitis. In a letter to Dr. Beuscher, Plath explained that prior to the miscarriage, Hughes had hit her: “Ted beat me up physically a couple of days before my miscarriage: the baby I lost was due to be born on his birthday. I felt this an aberration, & felt I had given him some cause, I had torn some of his papers in half.” Later, Plath would indicate that Hughes also verbally and emotionally abused her as their marriage became strained.
GROWING AS A WRITER
The Colossus and Other Poems received good reviews, but Plath wanted more success and a room of her own. While in recovery from appendicitis, Plath began to plan her first novel as well as write more poetry. By 1961, she was deep at work on The Bell Jar, mostly keeping this project a secret. She and Hughes moved out of London and into the country to a house called Court Green where they would have more space to write. This was a turbulent time in Plath's life but also one of unbridled creativity. Plath was very prolific while at Court Green and somehow in between caring for her daughter, giving birth to her son, Nicholas, and finding out her husband was having an affair, she wrote with great urgency what would eventually become most of Ariel (1965), an extraordinary and genre‐changing collection of poems that would make Plath famous after its posthumous publication.
With the end of her marriage looming, Plath returned to London with her children to start life as a single parent. In January 1963, The Bell Jar was published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas to mostly positive reviews—but unfortunately Plath did not live to see most of them. Plath had ambitions for her novel but deferentially referred to it as a “potboiler”—meaning a sensationalistic or shocking book. That she chose to publish under a pen name has been interpreted by scholars as evidence that Plath was concerned readers who were familiar with her story (such as friends or family) would see the text as purely autobiographical, since it is the story of a young woman who attempts suicide after an internship at a prestigious women's magazine. Plath wrote to her brother that it was a “secret” and “no one must read it!” To be fair, most of the people written about in The Bell Jar do not appear in a positive light—although this adds to the book's unexpected comedic power.
The winter of 1963 in London was one of the coldest to date. Plath had been thrown by the dissolution of her marriage and the prospect of life without Ted. She was alone in a country where she did not have a strong support system. And she was parenting two small children in a freezing apartment where things kept breaking. Though her depression had returned with a vengeance, Plath fought to stay optimistic and productive, but it was too hard. Her letters during this time show a woman continually reaching out to all her support systems but feeling entirely overwhelmed and heartbroken: “What appals [sic] me is the return of my madness, my paralysis, my fear & vision of the worst—cowardly withdrawal, a mental hospital, lobotomies,” she wrote to Dr. Beuscher (Letters Vol. 2, 2018, p. 967).
THE CREATION OF PLATH THE MYTH
Here's where Plath's life transforms into mythology, where a woman trying to survive the winter becomes a mad poet scribbling in the early morning poems of violence and otherworldliness. In this myth, Plath paces the small apartment twisting her hair. Her eyes are wild. She writes and writes and writes as if possessed. Her friend, writer and critic Al Alvarez, penned an iconic description that furthered this image:
I hardly recognised Sylvia when she opened the door. The bright young American house wife with her determined smile and crisp clothes had vanished along with the pancake make‐up, the school‐mistressy bun and fake cheerfulness. Her face was wax‐pale and drained: her hair hung loose down to her waist and left a faint, sharp animal scent on the air when she walked ahead of me up the stairs. She looked like a priestess emptied out by the rites of her cult. And perhaps that is what she had become. She had broken through to whatever it was that made her want to write, the poems were coming every day, sometimes as many as three a day, unbidden, unstoppable, and she was off in a closed, private world where no one was going to follow her. (Alvarez, 1970)
In reality, we can never know what went through Sylvia Plath's mind during this time. Through letters she wrote and interviews with friends and neighbors during her last few weeks, we know Plath reached out to friends, her primary care physician, Dr. Horder, and her former therapist, Dr. Beuscher. Plath was severely depressed and without adequate support: “I am suddenly in agony, desperate, thinking Yes let him [Hughes] take over the house, the children, let me just die & be done with it. How can I get out of this ghastly defeatist cycle & grow up. I am only too aware that love and a husband are impossibles to me at this time, I am incapable of being myself and loving myself,” she wrote to Beuscher on February 4.
On Monday, February 11, 1963, Plath died by suicide. She sealed herself off in the kitchen, away from her children, and turned the gas on. She left the manuscript for Ariel and Other Poems neatly on her desk. Later, Dr. Horder explained that he had found a bed for Plath at a mental hospital and she was set to be admitted on February 11 (Clark, 2020, p. 891). Biographer Heather Clark thinks that, in addition to suffering from depression and using medications carelessly, “the prospect of a potentially horrific stay in an unknown mental hospital was one that filled Plath with fear…she was on the verge of surrendering herself to unknown psychiatrists—likely all men—in a notorious asylum” (Clark, 2020, p. 887).
Plath did not leave a suicide letter; a note was found by the baby stroller that simply read: “PLEASE CALL DR. HORDER AT PRI 3804.” Plath's body was discovered that morning by the visiting nurse she had enlisted to help care for the children.
Ariel and Other Poems was later edited by Ted Hughes and published as Ariel in 1965. In a controversial move, Hughes reorganized the structure of the manuscript and removed poems that he considered cast him in a bad light. Hughes chose to end Ariel on “Words,” a poem that references fate in its last lines: “fixed stars govern a life.” What Hughes seemed to be saying with his reorganization was that Plath's suicide was unpreventable and destined to happen—thus distancing himself from his wife's desperate act.
In 2004, Frieda Hughes released her mother's original poetic manuscript, which showed the public that her mother had a very different vision of the collection that made her famous. In particular, Plath concluded her version with the cycle of bee poems, with the last line of the last poem giving a sense of optimism: “The bees are flying. They taste the spring.”
THE TROUBLE WITH BIOGRAPHY
One of the biggest issues in Plath studies has revolved around Plath's biography: Who gets to tell her story and what written version of this life do we trust? What are the biases? What is at stake? Especially when the person being written about is not alive, and therefore cannot defend herself, the issue of biography remains complicated to this day.
Biographies are intended to be factual accounts of a person's life. Using eyewitness accounts, interviews, and artifacts such as letters and journal entries, biographers do the best they can to craft a truthful portrait. But as we have learned over time, eyewitness accounts can be faulty. Memories can change or evolve. And as we see from