1. Family Background 

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), poet and novelist, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 27 October 1932, the first child of Otto and Aurelia Schober Plath. Forty-seven at the time of her birth, Otto Plath had emigrated from his native Prussia in 1901, receiving a doctorate from Harvard in 1928 (published as Bumblebees and Their Ways in 1934) before lecturing at Boston University, where he meet Aurelia, a second generation Austrian-American student. Plath spent her infancy in the seaside town of Winthrop, Massachusetts, during which she developed a profound attachment to her reticent and distant father. In 1940, following an emergency amputation of a leg (the result of an untreated diabetic condition), Otto died, and the family moved inland to Wellesley. Plath would never recover from this loss, whose presence can be felt throughout her work. 

2. Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell, and Anne Sexton

Enrolled at Newnham College, Cambridge, Plath began contributing verse to student magazines and as a result met Ted Hughes , whom she married on 16 June ('Bloomsday'), 1956. Upon the completion of her MA, the couple relocated to America -- Plath having secured a post at her alma mater. While Hughes 's The Hawk in the Rain (1957) had established him as a major new voice in English poetry -- thanks in part to his wife's tireless promotion of his work -- Plath still struggled to find her own, and during her year at Smith became convinced that the vocations of academic and writer were irreconcilable. Emboldened by the New Yorker 's acceptance of two poems ('Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbour' and 'Nocturne ') she quit Smith, settling with Hughes in Boston. Here Plath attended Robert Lowell 's poetry workshop, where she met Anne Sexton . Both encounters were crucial, Lowell introducing her to the possibilities of the recent 'confessional' turn in American verse, and Sexton to poetry's potential for articulating the specificity of female experience.

3. Separation with Hughes followed by an extraordinary period of creativity 

In the autumn of 1962, Hughes 's marital infidelity resulted in the couple's separation. Plath remained in Devon with her children, and entered a period of extraordinary creativity whose intensity and concentration is comparable to those that crowned the work of Keats and Rilke .

4. Her suicide leaving two children

On 11 February 1963, with a deliberation that left little doubt as to the finality of her decision, Plath, having placed bread and milk by her sleeping children, sealed her kitchen and leaving the gas oven on, ended her life.

5. Her posthumous fame as a "confessional" poet

Even in the context of post-war American confessional poetry, the centrality of Plath's life to the themes and development of her art is unprecedented, and the apparent necessity of establishing their relation have made both the subject of disparate and often contentious readings. Generally Plath's writing has been seen in terms of symptomatology.  

6. Plath as a Feminist Poet

The status of Plath's work was transformed by feminism, whose its insistence on the primacy of gendered experience problematised any easy distinction between the personal and the cultural. From this perspective, Plath's invocation of Nazism in poems such as 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus' bore witness to a pervasive phallocratic violence at whose extremity lay the atrocity of the concentration camps 

8. An Interview with Sylvia Plath