Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life, Second Edition (Literary Lives)

194 Pages·2003·0.67 MB·English

by  Linda Wagner-Martin

Sylvia Plath
A Literary Life
Second Edition
Linda Wagner-Martin
Literary Lives
General Editor: Richard Dutton, Professor of English, Lancaster University
This series offers stimulating accounts of the literary careers of the most admired and
influential English-language authors. Volumes follow the outline of the writers’
working lives, not in the spirit of traditional biography, but aiming to trace the
professional, publishing and social contexts which shaped their writing.
Published titles include:
Clinton Machann Mary Lago
MATTHEW ARNOLD E. M. FORSTER
Jan Fergus Shirley Foster
JANE AUSTEN ELIZABETH GASKELL
Tom Winnifrith and Edward Chitham Neil Sinyard
CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE¨ GRAHAM GREENE
Sarah Wood James Gibson
ROBERT BROWNING THOMAS HARDY
Janice Farrar Thaddeus Gerald Roberts
FRANCES BURNEY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
Caroline Franklin Kenneth Graham
BYRON HENRY JAMES
Nancy A. Walker W. David Kaye
KATE CHOPIN BEN JONSON
Roger Sales Phillip Mallett
JOHN CLARE RUDYARD KIPLING
Cedric Watts John Worthen
JOSEPH CONRAD D. H. LAWRENCE
Grahame Smith Angela Smith
CHARLES DICKENS KATHERINE MANSFIELD
George Parfitt Lisa Hopkins
JOHN DONNE CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
Paul Hammond Cedric C. Brown
JOHN DRYDEN JOHN MILTON
Kerry McSweeney Peter Davison
GEORGE ELIOT GEORGE ORWELL
Tony Sharpe Linda Wagner-Martin
T. S. ELIOT SYLVIA PLATH
Harold Pagliaro Felicity Rosslyn
HENRY FIELDING ALEXANDER POPE
Andrew Hook Richard Dutton
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
John Williams Peter Shillingsburg
MARY SHELLEY WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Michael O’Neill David Wykes
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY EVELYN WAUGH
Gary Waller John Mepham
EDMUND SPENSER VIRGINIA WOOLF
Tony Sharpe John Williams
WALLACE STEVENS WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Joseph McMinn Alasdair D. F. Macrae
JONATHAN SWIFT W. B. YEATS
Leone´e Ormond
ALFRED TENNYSON
Literary Lives
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Sylvia Plath
A Literary Life
Linda Wagner-Martin
Hanes Professor of English
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill
Second Edition
Revised and Expanded
Q Linda Wagner-Martin 1999, 2003
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First published 1999 by Macmillan Press Ltd
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wagner-Martin, Linda.
Sylvia Plath: a literary life / Linda Wagner-Martin. – 2nd ed.
p. cm. – (Literary lives)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-4039-1653-5 (pbk.)
1. Plath, Sylvia. 2. Poets, American–20th century–Biography. I. Title. II.
Literary lives (Palgrave Macmillan (Firm) )
PS3566.L27Z964 2003
811’.54–dc21
[B] 2003051159
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03
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For Andrea
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Contents
Chronology of Plath’s Literary Life viii
Preface xi
Part One
1 The Writing Life 3
2 Creating Lives 11
3 Creating the Persona of the Self 21
4 Recalling the Bell Jar 33
5 Lifting the Bell Jar 42
6 Plath’s Hospital Writing 54
7 Defining Health 67
Part Two
8 The Journey Toward Ariel 83
9 Plath’s Poems about Women 95
10 Plath’s Triumphant Woman Poems 106
11 Getting Rid of Daddy 119
12 Sylvia Plath, The Poet and her Writing Life 133
13 The Usurpation of Sylvia Plath’s Narrative:
Hughes’s Birthday Letters 146
Notes 154
Select Bibliography 170
Index 176
vii
Chronology of Plath’s
Literary Life
1932 Sylvia Plath born October 27 in Jamaica Plain, a part of
Boston, Massachusetts, to Aurelia Schober and Otto Plath.
Family living in Winthrop, Massachusetts.
1936 The Plath family, including son Warren, who was born
in the spring of 1935, moves to 892 Johnson Avenue
in Winthrop Center, near the grandparents’ Schober
home.
1938 Hurricane of 21 September (described in Plath’s poems).
1940 Otto Plath dies of an embolism following surgery (com-
plications from undiagnosed diabetes caused amputation
of leg). Sylvia and Warren do not attend funeral.
1942 The Plath family, now including the Schobers, moves to
23 Elmwood Road in Wellesley ( ‘‘inland’’ ) and Aurelia
takes a teaching post at Boston University. Sylvia moves
back a grade at Marshall Livingston Perrin Grammar
School.
1944 Sylvia enrolls at Alice L. Phillips Junior High School;
writes for The Phillipian, the school’s literary magazine.
1947 Sylvia enters Gamaliel Bradford Senior High School in
Wellesley; during her senior year, she co-edits The Brad-
ford.
1950–51 Scholarship student at Smith College, Northampton, Mas-
sachusetts, as an English major; lives at Haven house.
Dates, among others, Dick Norton (the model for Buddy
Willard of The Bell Jar).
1951 Works as a mother’s helper in Swampscott, Massachu-
setts, during summer.
1952 After sophomore year at Smith, works during the summer
at the Belmont Hotel in West Harwich, in Wellesley, and
in Chatham, Massachusetts. Lives in Lawrence house
beginning with her junior year at Smith.
1953 Mademoiselle College Board experience in New York dur-
ing June. Returns to Wellesley for the remainder of the
summer and becomes depressed. Receives bipolar electro-
convulsive shock treatments and on August 24 attempts
viii
Chronology ix
suicide. Recovery at McLean Hospital, Belmont, Massa-
chusetts.
1954 Returns to Smith for spring semester. Plans honors thesis
on Dostoyevski’s use of the double. Attends Harvard
summer school.
1955 Graduates summa cum laude from Smith in June; in the fall,
attends Newnham College, Cambridge, England, on a
Fulbright.
1956 Meets Ted Hughes February 25 and marries him secretly
June 16, with her mother in attendance. Grandmother
Schober dies in May. Honeymoon in Benidorm (Spain)
and Heptonstall, West Yorkshire. In December Plath and
Hughes rent a flat at 55 Eltisley Avenue, Cambridge.
Studies with Dorothea Krook.
1957 June, Plath takes her degree and moves with Hughes to
America. They summer on Cape Cod and then move to
Northampton where Plath teaches freshman English at
Smith for the year; Ted teaches part-time at The Univer-
sity of Massachusetts, Amherst.
1958 Moving to Boston in order to write, Sylvia takes part-
time jobs and resumes therapy with Ruth Buescher.
She attends Robert Lowell’s poetry seminar where
she becomes friends with Anne Sexton and George Star-
buck.
1959 After the summer spent traveling through the US, Sylvia
and Ted are residents at Yaddo, the writers’ colony in
Saratoga Springs, New York, until they sail for England
in December. Plath never returns to the United States.
1960 After holidays in West Yorkshire, they rent a flat at
3 Chalcot Square, London. Their first child, Frieda
Rebecca Hughes, is born there April 1. The Colossus is
published in England in October.
1961 February 6, Plath has a miscarriage; February 28, an
appendectomy. In late July, she and Hughes buy the
manor house, Court Green, in North Tawton, Devon.
1962 Nicholas Farrar Hughes born January 17; Plath writes
‘‘Three Women.’’ Marital difficulties intensify in the
spring and by October Hughes has moved into London.
Plath writes her late (‘‘October’’) poems, the main part of
Ariel. In mid-December, she and the children move to
23 Fitzroy Road (‘‘Yeats’ house’’) in London.