When This Brilliant Author Died, She Left Behind a Legacy of Grief, Haunting Poetry and Surprising Resilience

American poet and short story writer Sylvia Plath was considered a genius even during her lifetime, drawing literary attention from a young age. But her death on this day in 1963 has long overshadowed her literary legacy.

Plath was born in Boston in 1932, and the poet notably encountered tragedy at just 8 years old when her father died of untreated diabetes. Her first published poem—aptly titled “Poem”—appeared just a year later in the Boston Herald.

Her early career quickly picked up, with an adolescent Plath publishing in regional publications throughout school. Her first national success came just after she graduated high school, when the Christian Science Monitor published one of her poems.

From there, her brilliance—academically and creatively—flourished. She studied at Smith College, where she edited the Smith Review and served as a guest editor for Mademoiselle magazine. A hard-working scholarship student, Plath consistently scored at “genius” level on I.Q. tests.

At the same time, however, she was wracked by depression. She attempted suicide for the first time in 1953, taking her mother’s sleeping pills and curling up under the front porch. After inpatient treatment that consisted of electro- and insulin shock therapy, she returned to Smith. She threw herself back into her work and studies.

Best known for her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar and poetry collections The Colossus and Ariel, Plath sourced much of the fodder for these great works from the troubled last years of her life. She had married fellow poet Ted Hughes, but their marital life was not happy. The poet wrote to her therapist that Hughes was physically abusive, and her correspondence reveals both a miscarriage and the discovery that Hughes was having an affair with another woman.

Her separation from Hughes and a subsequent isolating move to London with her two young children brought on another depressive episode. She published The Bell Jar in January 1963 and sought help for her mental illness, noting that for the first time, she felt unable to work as her condition worsened.

On February 11, Plath killed herself in the sealed kitchen of her London flat, dying from carbon monoxide poisoning after placing her head in a gas stove. The writer was just 30 years old.

Her writings, and her death, have since been taken together as a coming-of-age story for the misunderstood young woman. Countless biographers have promised explanations for her life and death, and her novel The Bell Jar has served as a pop culture prop in movies and TV shows like 10 Things I Hate About You and “Sex Education.”

Ariel, a collection of Plath poems published after her death, illustrates Plath’s troubled legacy. Hughes edited and published the first version of this collection, removing some poems and reordering others. This alone added rage to remembrance of Plath for many readers, some of whom were so furious at Hughes’ seeming violation of his ex-wife’s wishes that they scratched “Hughes” off Plath’s tombstone. Plath’s mother published her own collection of letters from her daughter, and shortly before his death, Hughes made waves once more with Birthday Letters, a poetic account of his marriage with Plath.

In her poem “Lady Lazarus,” Plath herself wrote “Dying / is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.”

But in remembering Plath’s life and death, others have chosen to focus on her resilience. A truer-to-the-original edition of Ariel was published in 2004, and some point to Plath as a “resilient” and “courageous” figure. Her works cover far more than her depression, touching on joy, her experiences of motherhood and her childhood in New England. As she wrote in her journals, “Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise.”

Sarah Holzmann | READ MORE

Sarah Holzmann is a freelance writer from the Arlington, Virginia, area.