Sylvia Plath

Biography

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) published The Bell Jar under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas one month before her suicide in London on February 11, 1963. She was thirty years old. Like Esther Greenwood, she was from Wellesley, Massachusetts; won a guest editorship at Mademoiselle in the summer of 1953; underwent electro-convulsive therapy improperly administered; survived a serious suicide attempt; and was treated at a private facility funded by a scholarship benefactor. She went on to write Ariel, now considered one of the greatest poetry collections of the twentieth century. She never saw it published. The novel was published under her own name only in 1966, three years after her death.

Sylvia Plath at a glance