The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) was one of the most brilliant, intense, and influential American writers of the 20th century. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she was a stellar student and a prolific writer from a young age, eventually earning a scholarship to Smith College and later a prestigious Fulbright Fellowship to Cambridge University in England. It was in England that she met and married fellow poet Ted Hughes, a tempestuous and deeply complicated relationship that would profoundly shape her writing. Plath suffered from severe, clinical depression throughout her adult life—undergoing electroshock therapy and surviving a major suicide attempt during her college years—experiences that she would later transmute directly into her literature. Tragically, at the age of thirty, during a freezing London winter and amidst a painful separation from Hughes, Plath took her own life, leaving behind a body of work that laid bare the agonizing depths of mental illness and emotional isolation.