February 11, 1963: Sylvia Plath dies by suicide at her home in her adopted hometown of London. She was 30 years old. She had once written, "Death is an art, like anything else. I do it exceptionally well."
She was born on October 27, 1932 in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston, and grew up in nearby Winthrop and Wellesley, Massachusetts. She attended Smith College, the famed all-women's school across the State in Northampton.
In 1953, she was awarded a coveted position as a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine, during which she spent a month in New York. The experience was not what she had hoped for, and she ended up attempting suicide and being confined to the psychiatric ward of a hospital. This was at a time when attitudes toward mental health were considerably less enlightened than they are today. Many of the events that took place during that Summer were later used as inspiration for her novel The Bell Jar.
In late 1953 and early 1954, she was in psychiatric care, receiving electric and insulin shock treatment. She was released, and got her degree from Smith in 1955. She obtained a Fulbright Scholarship for the University of Cambridge, and moved to England.
She met British poet Ted Hughes, whose work impressed her. She called him "a singer, story-teller, lion and world-wanderer" with "a voice like the thunder of God." She later said, "We kept writing poems to each other. Then it just grew out of that, I guess, a feeling that we both were writing so much and having such a fine time doing it, we decided that this should keep on."
They married 4 months after they met. In late 1960, after the birth of their daughter Frieda, she published The Colossus, her 1st collection of poetry. Shortly thereafter, she had a miscarriage, and wrote several poems about it. In late 1961, she finished The Bell Jar. Their son Nicholas was born in 1962, but Sylvia discovered that Ted was having an affair with Assia Wevill, a married copywriter who, along with her husband, had survived the Holocaust. Sylvia left Ted, took the children to another residence across London, once held by William Butler Yeats, and began writing most of the poems for which she would be best remembered.
The Winter of 1962-63 was one of the coldest in British history. Her children were sick. The Bell Jar was published in January, under the pen name Victoria Lucas, but critics were indifferent. On February 11, 1963, she committed suicide by inhaling gas from her oven.
Ted was still living with Assia, who had not divorced her husband. In 1965, they had a daughter, Alexandra. Ted couldn't stay faithful to her, either, and, on March 23, 1969, Assia killed herself and Alexandra, using the same method as Sylvia.
The 1970s saw the start of "the second wave of feminism," and Sylvia was rediscovered. She became an icon for young female writers. A film was made of The Bell Jar in 1979, with Marilyn Hassett playing the Plath analogue, Esther Greenwood. In 2003, Gwyneth Paltrow starred in the film Sylvia.
Her fans often blame Ted for driving her, and his mistress, to suicide and then, through jealousy toward Sylvia's greater talent, living off her legend. And yet, in 1984, he was named Poet Laureate of Britain, a title previously held by John Dryden, William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, John Masefield and Cecil Day-Lewis; and now held by Simon Armitage. Ted died of cancer in 1998.
Sylvia and Ted's son Nicholas Hughes, a marine biologist, also suffered from depression, and committed suicide in 2009. Sylvia and Ted's daughter, Frieda Hughes, became a writer and painter, and an advocate for owls, living in Wales. She has been divorced 3 times, and has had no children, so Sylvia's line will die with her.
*
February 11, 1963 was a Monday. This was also the day that Julia Child's cooking show The French Chef premiered on what would become PBS, and the day The Beatles recorded most of their first album. I have separate entries for those events.
Baseball and football were out of season. No NBA or NHL games were played. So there were no scores on this historic day.
