From October 1955 until June 1957 she attended Newnham College, Cambridge, as a Fulbright scholar in English, spending her first winter and spring breaks travelling on the continent. In her senior year she met Richard Sassoon, nephew of Siegfried Sassoon, a sophisticated Yale student with a European background, who had a great influence upon her. She wrote an honours dissertation on the image of the double in Dostoyevsky, and graduated summa cum laude in June 1955.

With her glittering, newly dyed, blonde hair, and bright smile, she was popular on the social circuit. Later she wrote of this act: 'I … blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion.' It was a near-miracle that she survived, after lying hidden for three days in a ‘crawl space’ under the family house.įollowing further ECT, psychotherapy, and insulin-shock treatment at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, with Dr Ruth Beuscher, Plath returned to Smith in February 1954. She returned home and suffered a serious mental breakdown (for which she was treated with electro-convulsive therapy, ECT), and attempted to commit suicide by taking an overdose of her mother's sleeping pills on 24 August. It was a confused and troubled period, culminating in her being refused admission to the Harvard writing seminar. At the same time her journal describes her growing sensation of existing in a stifling ‘bell jar’ and charts her anxious thoughts: 'What to do? Where to turn? What ties, what roots?' In her third year she was awarded a guest editorship at Mademoiselle and spent what she was later to describe as the 'deadly summer of 1953' in New York ( Journals, 269). In the last three years she had earned $1000 through her writing, with her stories published in Seventeen and Mademoiselle. In 1952 she wrote ecstatically to her mother, 'The world is splitting open at my feet like a ripe, juicy watermelon'. She called herself at this time 'The girl who wanted to be God' ( Plath, Letters Home, 40).ĭuring Plath's first two years at Smith she led a frenetic life, writing poems and journalistic pieces, editing the Smith Review, and excelling academically. At eighteen she wrote in her journal: 'I can never read all the books I want I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want.' By the time she graduated from Bradford Senior High School in Wellesley, in 1950, she had sent dozens of stories to Seventeen magazine, finally succeeding in getting one published ( 'And Summer Will Not Come Again') in August that year, just before she entered Smith College with a prize scholarship. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Wallace Stevens, and Dylan Thomas. As a young poet she experimented with various forms, including the villanelle, and was influenced by such diverse writers as D. Her first published poem appeared in the Boston Traveller when she was eight. She was determined to succeed in everything she attempted, always striving for perfection and hugely dependent on her mother's praise. Sylvia was an ambitious child, and 'dangerously brainy', as she writes in 'America! America!' ( Plath, Johnny Panic, 36). The family moved inland to 26 Elmwood Road in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and Aurelia's parents helped to look after the children, while Aurelia worked for Boston University College of Practical Arts and Letters. In one of her last prose writings, 'Ocean 1212-W', she wrote that her first nine years 'sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle-beautiful inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth' ( Plath, Johnny Panic, 124). After his death she declared, 'I'll never speak to God again' it haunted her for the rest of her life. He died suddenly when Sylvia was eight, of undiagnosed diabetes, following an emergency leg amputation. Otto Plath was an entomologist, specializing in the study of bees, and a teacher of German at Boston University. Sylvia spent her early childhood at 24 Prince Street, Jamaica Plain, Boston, until 1936 when the family moved to 92 Johnson Avenue, Winthrop, where Aurelia's parents lived.

Their second child, Warren, was born in 1935. Otto had emigrated from Prussia at sixteen and Aurelia was a second-generation Austrian-American. Plath, Sylvia ( 1932–1963), poet and writer, was born in the Massachusetts Memorial Hospital on 27 October 1932, the daughter of Otto Emil Plath ( d.

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