50 Fun Facts About Sylvia Plath

In which year was Sylvia Plath born?

She was born on 27 October in the Jamaica Plain neighbourhood of Boston; the family later moved to Winthrop and then Wellesley.

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

His death in 1940, a week and a half after her eighth birthday, haunts poems including 'Daddy' and 'The Colossus'.

Otto Plath died in 1940 of complications from what?

Convinced he had lung cancer like a friend, he avoided doctors until his diabetes had gone too far, and died after a foot amputation.

Plath published her first poem at what age?

It appeared in the children's section of a local newspaper; she began keeping a journal at 11.

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

She lived in Haven House and then Lawrence House, where a plaque marks her old room, and edited the Smith Review.

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

She was one of twenty young women chosen; the disappointing summer became raw material for The Bell Jar.

Which Welsh poet was Plath furious to have missed meeting during her New York summer of 1953?

A boyfriend said she loved his work 'more than life itself'; the magazine's editor had arranged the meeting without her.

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

Prouty, the author of Stella Dallas and Now, Voyager, appears thinly disguised as Philomena Guinea in The Bell Jar.

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

The Magic Mirror earned her a summa cum laude degree in June 1955.

Plath went to Cambridge University on which scholarship?

She lived in a detached house called Whitstead on the edge of her college grounds.

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?

The wedding was at St George the Martyr in Holborn, London, with Plath's mother as the only witness.

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

George Starbuck was a classmate; the style the group developed became known as confessional poetry.

Which fellow poet in that seminar, later a Pulitzer winner for Live or Die, urged Plath to write as a woman?

Plath discussed her suicide attempt openly with her; Lowell thought the tightly controlled Plath could learn from her looseness.

M. L. Rosenthal first applied 'confessional' in 1959 to which book by Plath's seminar teacher?

Plath later told the BBC the book had profoundly influenced the poetry of her final phase.

Plath said she learned 'to be true to my own weirdnesses' during a 1959 stay at which artists' colony?

She and Hughes went there after a long camping trip across Canada, the US and Mexico.

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

Heinemann published it in the UK in October 1960, the year her daughter Frieda was born.

Plath's daughter Frieda was born in April 1960 and her son in January 1962. What was his name?

Nicholas Farrar Hughes became a fisheries biologist in Alaska.

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

They kept bees there from mid-1962, the subject of poems such as 'The Arrival of the Bee Box' and 'Stings'.

Which hobby, taken up at Court Green in 1962, gave Plath the subject of 'The Bee Meeting' and 'Swarm'?

Her father had been an authority on the same insects.

Hughes left Plath in 1962 for Assia Wevill, who had been introduced to the couple how?

The Wevills took over the Chalcot Square flat in 1961 and were invited to Court Green in May 1962.

In December 1962 Plath rented a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road, London, once home to which poet?

The house bears an English Heritage blue plaque for the Irish poet; the winter that followed was one of the coldest on record.

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

The name protected the real people behind the characters, and Plath herself in case the reviews were bad; they were largely indifferent.

Who is the narrator and heroine of The Bell Jar?

A 19-year-old from the Boston suburbs, she wins a summer internship at the fictional Ladies' Day magazine in New York.

In which year was The Bell Jar finally published in the United States?

When it finally appeared it became an instant best-seller and has been translated into more than forty languages.

Which of these was an early working title for The Bell Jar?

Another was Diary of a Suicide; the American publisher Harper & Row initially rejected the manuscript as 'juvenile and overwrought'.

Plath died in London on 11 February 1963 at what age?

Her live-in nurse was due at nine that morning; the inquest four days later recorded suicide.

Plath is buried in the churchyard of St Thomas the Apostle in Heptonstall, in which English county?

Hughes came from nearby Mytholmroyd; the inscription he chose reads 'Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted.'

Ariel, the collection on which Plath's reputation rests, was published in the UK in which year?

Faber & Faber issued it two years after her death; the US edition followed in 1966 with an introduction by her old seminar teacher.

As editor of Ariel, Ted Hughes did what to Plath's manuscript?

Not until 2004 did a restored edition present the selection and arrangement as Plath had left them.

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

Plath's daughter, a poet and painter, also objected to the 2003 biopic and refused it the use of her mother's poems.

The poem 'Daddy' was written on 12 October 1962, how long after Plath's separation from Hughes?

It uses controversial Holocaust metaphors to explore her relationship with her father, and appeared posthumously in Ariel.

'Lady Lazarus', one of Plath's best-known Ariel poems, is written in how many tercet stanzas?

It is in free verse and, with 'Daddy' and 'Mary's Song', is counted among her 'Holocaust poems'.

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

Critic Eileen Aird called it a mode blending the ironic and the violent.

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

She was only the fourth person to receive it posthumously.

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

It covered the winter of 1962 up to her death; a second journal was reported lost.

Hughes sealed two of Plath's journals until 11 February 2013. Why that date?

He unsealed them shortly before his own death in 1998, and the Unabridged Journals appeared in 2000.

Ted Hughes's 1998 collection of 88 poems about his relationship with Plath was called what?

It came out months before his death, broke 35 years of near silence and won the Whitbread Book of the Year.

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?

Daniel Craig played Hughes; a friend of both criticised the film for showing Sylvia as 'a permanent depressive'.

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

Her father Otto came from Grabow in Prussia; the family's German identity became a troubling theme in her poems.

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

They appeared partly in response to the strong American reaction to The Bell Jar; unabridged two-volume letters followed in 2017 and 2018.

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

When the book finally reached the US it sat on the New York Times best-seller list for weeks.

Two collections of uncollected Plath poems appeared in 1971. One was Winter Trees; what was the other?

Peter Porter wrote in the New Statesman that it was 'full of perfectly realised works'.

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

It also gathers other prose writings and diary excerpts.

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

Those years were spent by the sea in Winthrop, before the family moved inland to Wellesley after her father's death.

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

Point Shirley, where her grandparents lived, is another Winthrop place name that appears in her poetry.

In 1957 Plath and Hughes moved to the US, where she took a teaching job at which institution?

She found teaching left too little time to write, and in 1958 the couple moved to Beacon Hill in Boston.

In 1958 Plath was a receptionist in which department of Massachusetts General Hospital?

The job later fed the story 'Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams'.