sYLVIA PLATH
Sylvia Plath Sylvia was born on October 27, 1932 in Boston after her parents had married on January 4 of that year. ... During the latter half of the 1930s her father Emil Otto Plath became ill and was convinced of his self-diagnosis of lung cancer. Otto Plath died on the night of November 5, 1940, and when the eight-year-old Sylvia was informed of her fathers death, she vowed that she would never speak to God again. ... To finish out her high school career, Plath consistently received good grades and earned recognition and publication as a writer, artist and editor. In her senior year, her story "And Summer Will Not Come Again" was accepted for Seventeen magazine and she saw the first national publication of one of her poems when "Bitter Strawberries" appeared in The Christian Science Monitor just after her graduation in 1950--where Plath graduated first in her class. Time after time the rejection slips would come--sometimes causing Plath to begin doubting her abilities and fearing she had lost her talent. ... Emotional turmoil inside Sylvia mounts to a perilous culmination when in August of 1953, Sylvia makes her first attempt at suicide. ... Three days passed before Warren Plath discovered Sylvia tucked away in a space in the Plaths cellar wall. ... Sylvia wins a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge University in 1955 and starts the term at Newnham College. ... Accounts of their first meeting at a Cambridge party recount the way Sylvia was drawn immediately to Ted, who seemed colossal to her. ... In June of 1956, Sylvia marries Ted Hughes. ... They lived in near poverty, and Sylvia sacrificed much of her own ambitions for Ted, typing and retyping his poems, sending them out to magazines, helping him gain publication. ... Sylvia the poet and writer had been overshadowed by Sylvia the wife. Sylvia promised herself not to have children until she had succeeded. Ted wanted children however, and before Sylvia had the opportunity to establish herself more as a writer, she found herself pregnant with Frieda in 1960 and Nicholas in 1962.