Sylvia Plath was born on 27 October 1932, at Robinson Memorial Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. Sylvia's parents were Otto Emil Plath 1885-1940) and Aurelia Schober Plath (1906-1994). Sylvia would be an only child for two and a half years, when her brother Warren was born, 27 April 1935. Her first home was on 24 Prince Street in Jamaica Plain, a suburb of Boston. After Warren's birth, the family moved to 92 Johnson Avenue in Winthrop, just east of Boston. This is where Sylvia became familiar and intimate with the sea. From an early age she enjoyed the sea and could recognize its beauty & power.
Her father died on 5 November 1940, only a week and a half after Sylvia's eighth birthday. He died of diabetes mellitus which at the time was a very curable disease. Otto Plath's health began to fail shortly after the birth of Warren in 1935. He thought he had cancer as a friend of his, with similar symptoms, had recently lost a battle with lung cancer. Otto Plath was an expert on bees. He wrote a book called Bumblebees and Their Ways, published in 1934. Sylvia was impressed with her father's handling of bees. He could catch them and they wouldn't sting! (He caught only the males; the males don't have stingers.) Upon his death a friend only asked "How could such a brilliant man have been so stupid?"
In 1942 Aurelia moved the family to 26 Elmwood Road, in Wellesley. Sylvia lived in this house until she began college. She repeated the fifth grade so that she would be in class with children her same age, so she aced it. From then on Sylvia was a star student. Making straight A's the whole way through High School and she excelled in English, particularly creative writing. Her first poem appeared when she was eight in the Boston Herald (10 August 1941, page B-8). She won a scholarship to attend Smith College, an all girls' school in Northampton, Massachusetts. Sylvia was ecstatic in the fall of 1950 to be a 'Smith girl.'
She immediately felt the pressures of College life, from the academic to the social. She wanted to be both brilliant and friendly, and she achieved both. She had been keeping a journal for some years, and the Journals really started to gain importance to her in College. It was a way to work out boy troubles, girl troubles and poems. She would come to rely heavily on her Journals for inspiration and documentation. She had a very quick, sharp eye, noting details that most people miss and take for granted. She had an affair of sorts with her Journals, telling it secrets and presenting a completely different and real self on those pages. Sometimes she was blunt, other times candid. One of the more memorable passages she writes about the joy of picking her nose! (January 1953)
At this point in her life, the early Smith years, she was writing very measured, pretty poems. She had the craft of poemmaking down, but she didn't have the voice. She was working hard on syllabics, paying close attention on line lengths, stanza lengths and a myriad of other poetic do's and don'ts that any apprentice should know. Sylvia Plath was different though as she worked herself to perfection. She relied on her thesaurus to push her way through poem after poem. She emulated Dylan Thomas and W.H. Auden. She read Richard Wilbur, Marianne Moore and John Crowe Ransom. She also wanted to write short stories for Ladies Home Journal and other influential 1950's magazines. She was also sending poems and stories out regularly, facing rejection most of the time. She did, however, receive some success.
Beginning in 1950 Sylvia Plath began publishing in national periodicals. Her article "Youth's Apeal for World Peace was published in the Christian Science Monitor (CSM) on 16 March. Her short story "And Summer Will Not Come Again" appeared in the August issue of Seventeen & the poem "Bitter Strawberries" appeared in the 11 August CSM. Throughout 1951 Sylvia was collecting rejection slips at a fast pace, but she was also published quite a bit. Beginning in 1953 Sylvia was also writing articles for local newspapers like the Daily Hampshire Gazette and the Springfield Union as their Smith College correspondent.
Her short story, 'Sunday at the Mintons' won first prize in a Mademoiselle contest. From this story, she also won a Guest Editorship at Mademoiselle at 575 Madison Avenue in New York City during June 1953. (the offices have since moved.) She and several other young women stayed at the women only Barbizon Hotel, at 63rd and Lexington Avenue's. The events of this very important month are well covered in her novel, The Bell Jar. (In The Bell Jar she calls the hotel, The Amazon.) Her published Journals for these months are thin, and don't reveal too much about the breakdown that followed.
She returned from the New York exhausted mentally and physically. She was banking on being admitted to a Harvard summer class on writing. When she received word she had not been accepted, Sylvia Plath's fate was also secured. Her Journals end abruptly in July.
Throughout July and early August Plath tells us in her novel that she could neither read nor sleep nor write. In an interview given to the Voices & Visions audio/video series, Aurelia Plath tells the reader that Sylvia could in fact read, and that she meticulously read Freud's Abnormal Psychology. Sylvia felt despondent. On 24 August 1953, Plath left a note saying, "Have gone for a long walk. Will be home tomorrow." She took a blanket, a bottle of sleeping pills, a glass of water with her down the stairs to the cellar. There she crept into a two and a half foot entrance to the crawl space underneath the porch. She began swallowing the pills in gulps of water and fell unconscious.
Aurelia Plath gave a good fight into finding the missing Sylvia, barely waiting a few hours to phone the police. Headlines in the papers the next day, 25 August 1953, alerted many of Plath's friends. Headlines were less favorable the next day, Wednesday 26 August 1953. However, around lunchtime Plath was found with eight sleeping pills still in the bottle.
Sylvia was treated at McLean Hospital in Belmont with the help of her Smith benefactress Olive Higgins-Prouty. Her Doctor was Ruth Beuscher, and Dr. Beuscher would go on to be a great help to Plath in the years to come. Her recovery was not easy, but Sylvia pulled through and was readmitted to Smith for the Spring 1954 semester. This is really the beginning of Sylvia Plath, poet.
1954 was a remarkable year. She met Richard Sassoon, who would later play a significant role as lover. Plath also continued where she left off at Smith, doing excellent work in spite of the breakdown. That summer she studied at Harvard Summer School. The next school year at Smith, Plath worked hard, continuing her excellence. In the Spring 1955 semester, Plath turned in her English honors thesis, The Magic Mirror: The Double in Dostoevsky. She graduated summa cum laude that Spring and also won a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College, Cambridge University.
Before Sylvia left for England though, she needed to get through the summer of living at 26 Elmwood Road where her first suicide attempt, two years earlier occurred. She spent much of her time dating young men like Richard Sassoon, Gordon Lameyer and toward the end of the summer, an editor named Peter Davison. As Plath sailed to England, according to sources, Plath spent her time "flirting and then making love (Wagner-Martin)." Sylvia was most excited about Cambridge for many reasons, two of which were it's possibility for the best education and to find a man to marry (at that time men outnumbered women at Cambridge by the astonishing ten to one).
As an American in England, Plath was shocked and overwhelmed by Cambridge. Coming to an England in mid-September Plath spent her first ten days in London, sightseeing and shopping. When Plath arrived at 4 Barton Road and Whitstead she was at first disappointed as it is at the back of the College. She loved Cambridge though and immediately became familiar with it's old streets and customs. British schooling is very different than in America so Plath had major adjustments ahead of her. She had to choose her courses for two years and at the end of the second year were the exams. This meant much study on her own, though she was responsible for writing essay's weekly on topics, attending lectures and meeting one hour a week with her tutors. Plath's tutor Dorothea Krook would become a very important female role model in the coming years, much as Dr Ruth Beuscher was as well. Krook taught Plath in a course on Henry James and the Moralists. Her academic load was much lighter than it had been at Smith, so that autumn Plath joined the Amateur Dramatics Club (ADC) and had a small role as an insane poetess. She tried to steer clear of dating to much as she did spend time adjusting to life their. She was also involved with Richard Sassoon who was living in Paris during this time. Plath spent her winter holiday with Sassoon in and around Paris and Europe. However romantic this Holiday was, Sassoon soon wrote to Plath asking for a break, telling Sylvia that He would contact her when He was ready.
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