The Life and Work of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was born into a comfortably middle-class family in Boston on October 27, 1932. She grew up in style and attended Smith College where she suffered a breakdown at the end of her junior year, but recovered well enough to return and excel during her senior year, receiving various prizes and graduating summa cum laude. In recent years, many people have labeled her as a sufferer while critics have denounced her as a shrew. Plath's devotees maintain that she was the victim of a sexist society, her suicide a response to the oppression of women, and her poetry a compilation of female wounds.
In 1955, having been awarded a Fulbright scholarship, she began two years at Cambridge University. There she met and married the British poet Ted Hughes. In 1957 Plath returned to the U.S., where she taught literature at the Smith College. From 1958 to 1959 she worked as a clerk i...