- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 July 2008 15.41 BST
1932-1963
"Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. "
Birthplace
Massachusetts, US
Education
Scholarship to Smith College, Mass.; Fulbright scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge
Other jobs
English teacher at Smith College; receptionist at psychiatric clinic
Did you know?
Her first volume, the 1960 A Winter Ship, was published anonymously.
Critical verdict
A bright young thing hiding terrible depressions, Plath published her first poem at eight and went on to win various awards and scholarships, including a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for the Collected Poems; her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, has become a classic of American literature. Unfortunately adopted as patron saint of a cult of angsty victimhood, her work overshadowed by her life, the power and precision of her poetry are nonetheless acknowledged.
Recommended works
The Bell Jar; Ariel
Influences
Dylan Thomas, WH Auden, Richard Sassoon, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, George Starbuck, Ted Hughes
Now read on
Anne Sexton's work shares many features with Plath's. Hughes's Birthday Letters has provided new insight into their relationship; some of the poems are echoes of or replies to Plath's work. Also see The Bed Book, a fanciful poem Plath wrote for her children about a jet-propelled bed.
Adaptations
The Bell Jar (1979, dir Larry Peerce) made many changes to Plath's story.
Recommended biography
Though Ted Hughes burnt many of her diaries after her death, her spookily upbeat letters to her mother, written from Cambridge, have been published as Letters Home. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991) by Jacqueline Rose is objective and readable; Anne Stevenson's controversial Bitter Fame takes Plath to task for self-aggrandisement.
Criticism
The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm takes on the biographical details that have dogged Plath's poetic legacy.
