Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts to European immigrant parents: Otto and Aurelia Plath. She spent her early childhood years in a seaport town of Winthrop, then, just after her father’s death in 1940, she moved to the town of Wellesley, Boston’s suburbia. It obviously influenced Plath’s life, but also left a truly significant mark on her literary work, as the theme of the absent father is visibly present in her texts. That, and other themes, as well as Plath’s own experiences are somewhat depicted in the The Bell Jar, which eventually allows the readers and critics to consider it a semi-autobiographical novel. It is a sort of a coming-of-age story, but instead of a stable and subtle progress into maturity and adulthood, the protagonist, Esther Greenwood, slowly regresses into distortion and madness.

The book was published in London (1963) under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas mainly for two reasons: Plath questioned its literary value, and also felt uneasy about the harm she may cause to people she mentioned in the book, and failed to disguise it. In 1966 it was finally published in England under her real name. In America, the novel did not appear until 1971.

The Bell Jar is the only ‘long short story’ that Plath ever created, as her main area of literary expertise was poetry. In 1960 she published her first book of poems Collossus. Other volumes of poetry were published posthumously, and they include Ariel (1966) Crossing the Water (1971), Winter Trees (1971), and The Collected Poems (1981), the last one being the Pulitzer Prize Award committee’s choice.

by Ewa Olszewska

References:

Ames, Lois. 1971. Sylvia Plath: A biographical note [in:] Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. Harper & Row. New York.
Butscher, Edward. 1976. Sylvia Plath. Method and Madness. The Seabury Press. New York.
Grocott, Kirsty. 2013. Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar still haunts me. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/9793589/Sylvia-Plaths-Bell-Jar-still-haunts-me.html (date of access: 17 November 2013).