My favorite writer is slvia plath.i started 2 love her stories when last semester my lecturer did her
novel call the "Bell Jar" with us.
Sylvia Plath was born in Boston. Her father was a professor of biology at Boston University,
and had specialized in bees. He has been characterized as authoritarian and died of diabetes
in 1940 when Plath was eight years old. Her mother, Aurelia, worked at two jobs to support
Sylvia and her brother Warren, but in her diary Plath reveals her hatred for her mother.
At school Plath appeared to be a model student: she won prizes and scholarships.
She studied at Gamaliel Bradford Senior High School (now Wellesley High School)
andat the Smith College from 1950 to 1955. In LETTERS HOME (1975), edited by Plath's
mother, she revealed a portrait of a young woman driven by hopes for the highest success
alternating with moods of deep depression.
Her first awarded story, "Sunday at the Mintons," was published in 1952 while she was at
college in magazine Mademoiselle. Plath worked in 1953 on the college editorial board at
the same magazine and suffered a mental breakdown which led to a suicide attempt. She described
this period of her live in THE BELL JAR, her autobiographical novel, which was published under
the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in 1963, a month before her death. The novel takes place in New York
at the height of the Cold War, during the hot summer in which the Rosenbergs were sent to the electric chair,
convicted of spying for the Soviets. Against this background Plath sets the story of the breakdown and
near-death of her heroine. The book is considered a powerful exploration of the restricted role of women.
With J.D. Salinger's The Cather in the Rye it is recognized as a classic of adolescent angst.
After winning a Fulbright scholarship, Plath attended Newnham College, Cambridge (England).
She met there in 1956 the poet Ted Hughes, "... big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me,
'' whom she married next year. Hughes's first impression was "American legs / Simply went on up.
That flaring hand, / Those long, balletic, monkey- / elegant fingers. / And the face -- a tight ball of
joy." They first met at a student party, where she bit Hughes on the cheek, really hard. It set the tone
to their tumultuous relationship. Plath decided to be a good wife, but Hughes was not the ideal husband
she imagined: he was moody, penchant for nosepicking, and dressed slovenly. Also Plath's suspicions of
Hughes's infidelity burdened her.
Plath's early poetry was based on then current styles of refined and ironic verse. Under the influence of
her husband and the work of Dylan Thomas and Gerald Manley Hopkins, she developed with great force
her talents. In 1957 Plath returned to the U.S., where she worked as a teacher of literature at the Smith College.
From 1958 to 1959 she worked as a clerk in Boston and studied poetry at Robert Lowell's course. Plath moved
again to England in 1959. Her first child, Frieda Rebecca, was born in 1960 and second, Nicholas Farrar, in 1962.
Next year appeared her well-known poems, the aggressive 'Lady Lazarus' and the notorious 'Daddy', in which
Plath expanded the boundaries intimate expression.
Plath died in London on February 11, 1963; she committed suicide. Her gravestone is in Yorkshire. Hughes's name
was chipped off her tombstone, and his poetry readings were disrupted by shouts of "murderer." Tragically, Assia Wevill
killed herself in the same way as Plath - by gas. She also killed their daughter, Shura. During her career as writer Plath was
loosely linked to the confessional poets, a term used to describe among others Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton
(1928-74, committed suicide), and John Berryman. Her literary reputation rests mainly on her carefully crafted pieces of poetry,
particularly the verse that she composed in the months leading up to her death. Plath has been considered a deeply honest writer,
whose ceaseless self-scrutiny has given an unique point of view to psychological disorder and to the theme of the feminist-martyr
in a patriarchal society. In this discourse, Ted Hughes has become the villain, whom Robin Morgan accused in 1972
in a poem of killing Plath. "I accuse / Ted Hughes," she wrote in 'The Arraignment'. However,
Janet Malcolm has defended Hughes in her book The Silent Woman (1994), in which she sees Plath's literary spouse
a Prometheus figure who has to "watch his young self being picked over by biographers, scholars, critics, article
writers and newspaper journalists."
Plath's 'COLLECTED POEMS' (1981), assembled and edited by Ted Hughes, won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.
Her journals appeared in 1982 heavily edited by Hughes, who explained that he wanted to spare the children further distress.
Feminist critics have suspected that Hughes tried to protect himself. But when Karen V. Kukil assembled the unabridged journals,
published in 2000, critics doubted the ethics of dutifully revealing a Plath's unrevised work with grammatical errors and misspellings.
