45 Fun Facts About Sylvia Plath

Besides biology, which language did Sylvia Plath's father Otto teach at Boston University?

German: Aurelia met Otto when he was her professor there, and they married in January 1932, the year Sylvia was born.

Plath's father Otto, a Boston University biology professor, wrote a 1934 book about which insects?

Bumblebees were Otto's specialty, and decades later Sylvia took up beekeeping herself and wrote a sequence of bee poems.

Otto Plath died in 1940 of complications from what?

Untreated diabetes killed him in 1940, when Sylvia was eight, and his death haunts her most infamous poem, 'Daddy'.

Which private women's college in Massachusetts did Plath attend from 1950?

Smith awarded her a summa cum laude degree in 1955, two years after a breakdown and suicide attempt had interrupted her studies.

After her third year of college Plath spent a month in New York as a guest editor at which magazine?

Mademoiselle gave her the New York month she later turned into The Bell Jar, whose heroine hurls her clothes off the hotel roof.

Which novelist paid for Plath's college scholarship and her 1953 stay at McLean Hospital?

Olive Higgins Prouty, author of Now, Voyager, had been treated for a breakdown herself, and her psychiatrist had urged her to take her writing seriously.

Plath's undergraduate thesis studied 'the double' in two novels by which author?

Dostoyevsky's doubles later shaped The Bell Jar, critics argue, and its dreamlike opening echoes the first scene of his novel The Double.

Plath went to Cambridge University on which scholarship?

Fulbright funding took her to Cambridge in 1955, and within months she met the English poet Ted Hughes at a party.

At which Cambridge college was Plath a student?

She studied there with Dorothea Krook, whom she held in high regard.

Plath met Ted Hughes in February 1956 at a party launching which poetry magazine?

She had read his poems in the magazine and wanted to meet him; they married four months later.

Plath and Hughes married on 16 June 1956, a date chosen in honour of what?

Bloomsday was their choice, and after the wedding they spent most of their honeymoon in Benidorm, on Spain's Costa Blanca.

Back in the US in 1959, Plath attended a writing seminar at Boston University taught by which poet?

Robert Lowell's class pushed her toward writing from raw personal experience, the style that critics soon labelled confessional poetry.

Which poet in Plath's 1959 Boston University poetry seminar later won a Pulitzer Prize for Live or Die?

Anne Sexton had met Plath in that seminar, and after Plath's suicide she mourned her in the poem 'Sylvia's Death'.

In a 1959 review, M. L. Rosenthal first called which book of poems 'confessional'?

Life Studies was, Plath said in a 1962 interview, a 'breakthrough into very serious, very personal, emotional experience' that excited her own late work.

At which artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, did Plath and Hughes stay in autumn 1959?

Yaddo is where she wrote a seven-part sequence of poems that Hughes, in earlier writings, seemed to see as the true start of her best work.

Plath's first collection, and the only poetry book published in her lifetime, was called what?

The Colossus stayed her only poetry book in print while she lived, and Ariel, the book her fame rests on, appeared two years after her death.

What was the name of the son Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes had in January 1962?

Nicholas Hughes became a fisheries biologist in Alaska, a love of fish and fishing he shared with his father, Ted.

In 1961 Plath and Hughes moved to Court Green, a house in North Tawton in which English county?

Devon is where the couple hosted Assia and David Wevill for a weekend in May 1962, the visit on which Hughes fell for Assia.

Which poetry critic and friend of Plath said in 2000, 'I failed her', about her final weeks?

Al Alvarez had championed her last poems in The Observer, yet he admitted he never saw how depressed she was when she came to him for help.

How did Assia Wevill, for whom Hughes left Plath in 1962, first enter the couple's lives?

She rented their old flat with her husband, and in 1965 she and Hughes had a daughter, Shura.

In December 1962 Plath rented a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road, once the boyhood home of which poet?

W. B. Yeats's blue plaque over the door drew her to the house, and she took living there as a good omen.

Under what pen name was The Bell Jar first published in January 1963?

Victoria Lucas spared her mother and the real people behind the characters, since the novel drew so closely on her own life.

Who is the narrator and heroine of The Bell Jar?

Esther Greenwood feels trapped under a bell jar, struggling for breath, the image of depression that gives the novel its title.

Why was The Bell Jar kept from American readers until 1971?

Her mother opposed it, and Harper & Row, which finally published it there in 1971, had once turned the manuscript down.

In which city did Sylvia Plath die, at the age of 30?

London is where she died less than a month after The Bell Jar was published there under a pen name.

Sylvia Plath is buried in the village of Heptonstall, in which English county?

West Yorkshire was Ted Hughes's home ground, and her headstone there has repeatedly had the name 'Hughes' hacked off it.

Which British literary prize did Ted Hughes win in both 1998 and 1999?

The Whitbread Book of the Year went to his Tales from Ovid and then to his poems about Plath, the second awarded after his death.

What did Ted Hughes do to Plath's Ariel manuscript as its editor?

He reordered and changed it, leaving out poems she had chosen, until a 2004 edition restored her own order and selection.

Who wrote the foreword to Ariel: The Restored Edition in 2004?

Frieda Hughes, a poet and painter, had also refused the 2003 film Sylvia any use of her mother's poems.

Plath described 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus' as belonging to which unlikely category?

Light verse was Plath's own label, which critics read through W. H. Auden's view that light verse can be serious.

The Collected Poems, published in 1981, won Plath which honour the following year?

The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry honoured a collection edited by Ted Hughes, who controlled her work only because they had never divorced.

Ted Hughes admitted destroying which of Plath's papers, saying he did not want her children to read it?

Her last journal was destroyed, and an unfinished novel she left behind later went missing too and has never been found.

Why did Ted Hughes seal two of Plath's journals until 11 February 2013?

The 50th anniversary of her death was the date he chose, yet Hughes unsealed the journals himself in 1998, shortly before he died.

What was Ted Hughes's 1998 collection of poems about his relationship with Plath called?

Birthday Letters finally broke Hughes's long public silence about Plath, and it was published only nine months before he died.

Ted Hughes held which official post from 1984 until his death in 1998?

He was born in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, and had served in the RAF as a ground wireless mechanic.

Which actress played Plath in the 2003 biopic Sylvia?

Gwyneth Paltrow starred opposite Daniel Craig as Hughes, in a film that Plath's daughter attacked in a poem published in Tatler.

Plath's mother Aurelia was the American-born daughter of immigrants from which country?

Austria was her parents' homeland, and after Otto died Aurelia taught secretarial studies at Boston University.

Under what title did Plath's mother publish abridged family correspondence in 1975?

Letters Home was meant to show a loving, dutiful daughter and to answer the angry tone of The Bell Jar.

The Bell Jar's US publisher Harper & Row initially rejected the manuscript, calling it what?

'Disappointing, juvenile and overwrought' was the verdict, which left Plath free to take the novel to a British publisher instead.

Besides Winter Trees, which posthumous Plath collection was published in Britain in 1971?

Crossing the Water came out alongside Winter Trees, the book that finally printed poems Hughes had cut from Ariel, such as 'Thalidomide'.

Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, published by Faber in 1977, is a collection of what?

Short stories and prose: she had already published stories in national magazines while still in her teens.

Plath's essay 'Ocean 1212-W' says her first nine years 'sealed themselves off like' what?

A ship in a bottle: those seaside years ended when her father died and the family moved inland, leaving them beautiful but out of reach.

Which Plath poem, prompted by visiting her father's grave in Winthrop, is named for a Greek heroine?

Electra on Azalea Path followed a visit that left Plath feeling cheated, and tempted, she wrote, to dig her father up.

Why did Plath quit teaching at her old college in 1958?

It left too little time to write, so she and Hughes moved to Boston for what her letters call a writing year.

In 1958, Plath took a job in which department of Massachusetts General Hospital?

The psychiatric unit job had Plath typing up patients' records, five years after she had been in psychiatric care herself.