Plath had missed an opportunity to meet the writer Dylan Thomas, and was so distraught that she cut up her legs to see if she was “brave” enough to commit suicide.Ī few weeks later, she nestled into the crawlspace underneath her mother’s home and took an excessive amount of sleeping pills. Plath’s first brush with suicide took place after her third year at Smith College – the volatile time that inspired her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. Boston newspaper clippings from the time of Plath’s first suicide attempt. And you hate him because he has deprived you of that: – – walks and aloneness.” She attempted suicide several different times The journal entry goes on to declare, “You know that you won’t go out with him again if he asks. She struggled and Bill eventually relented. Though the date seemed to go fine at first, with Plath and her date - whom she calls “Bill” - leaving the restaurant for a walk, Bill then told Sylvia that, “I want you to be mine, all mine,” and pushed her down into a pile of pine needles. She was assaulted on a blind dateĪ passage in the Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath recalls a terrifying blind date Plath had during her first year at Smith College, a date which could have inspired her short story “A Brief Encounter.” Plath excelled in college, even if her personal life would soon unravel. Repeating a grade seemed to have no negative effect on her future academic career. This decision came after her family moved from Winthrop to Wellesley, Massachusetts, and wanted Plath to attend class with children her own age. In spite of her 160 IQ (recorded at age 12), Plath repeated fifth grade. Plath, also recognized for her talent in visual art, won a Scholastic Art & Writing award. Plath had many more pieces published in local newspapers and periodicals, and at age 11 her mother encouraged her to keep a journal, which contained artwork as well as poetry. Plath lived in Winthrop, Massachusetts at the time that her first poem - simply named “Poem” - appeared in the Boston Herald in 1941. Here are eight fascinating Sylvia Plath facts you might not already know: She had her first poem published at eight years old
What we can do, however, is attempt to understand the intricacies of her life that may have shaped her world, and her decision to leave it. We can’t know if Plath’s poetry struck such a lasting chord because of depression’s effect on her - or in spite of it.
Maybe you read The Bell Jar in high school or college, the grim tale which chronicles a young woman’s coming of age and which author Jeanette Wilson has described as “a call to action because it is a diary of despair.”Įven if you haven’t read Plath’s words, her life - particularly her painful marriage to poet Ted Hughes and her eventual suicide - has made her something of a cultural icon, placing her alongside other dark, brilliant female authors such as Virginia Woolf, Mary Shelley, and Emily Dickinson.
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